hat bliss it is to be alive, in Jack McDevitt's new novel. We are in
America. As science fiction readers, it is an America we know very well; and love dearly.
The catastrophe has happened -- in Eternity Road, it seems to have been caused by a plague from Africa whose effect on the Western world is not only devastating but instantaneous. Cars have rolled to a stop on Interstates. Computer-driven artifacts -- from maglev public transportation systems and idiot-savant robot bank guards to computer simulations of Winston Churchill -- have simply continued to operate, for no one had a chance to turn them off. Only a few humans survive.
This all happens around the middle of the next century. Eternity Road itself takes place a thousand or so years further on. The
balkanization of America into tiny legible walkable squabbling
mini-states (as in Edgar Pangborn's Davy [1965] and elsewhere) has duly occurred; but by the time the amiable protagonists of McDevitt's quest tale begin to work out their route to the haven (it is called
Haven) where the secrets of the past may have been stored, these
mini-states have settled down, amalgamated, abandoned the religious
fundamentalisms familiar to SF readers, become (in short) the kind of
places that the kind of character Judy Garland played before she grew up
might have never wanted to leave.
Nothing could be finer.
The secrets of the Roadmakers
The story -- which is without enemies -- is not complex. Eight years
before the main tale begins, Karik Endine returns to the city state of
Memphis from a quest he had led northwards towards the mythical Haven,
where (it is rumored) guru scientists have preserved the secrets of the
Roadmakers whose ancient artifacts strew the verdant new world; but he
returns alone. He is the only survivor.
The main tale begins. Karik has committed suicide, bequeathing to
Chaka, the sister of one of his old comrades, a precious, unique,
previously-unknown copy of Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. It can only be that he had brought it back from Haven -- that, in other words, he and his companions had reached their destination (one familiar to SF readers of Leigh Brackett's The Long Tomorrow [1955] and many others: this is deliberate).
He must have hoped to start another quest.
There are no enemies in Eternity Road.
The quest is begun. Chaka's companions are various, and with neat
compassionate accuracy distinguished from one another in McDevitt's only
superficially "serviceable" prose. McDevitt is, in fact, a writer of
intense clarity; his control over his plots is humane but unrelenting;
his bent is always to continue (in this, he is like a true writer of
fantasy -- as opposed to the "fantasy" writers whose tetralogies-doubled
are object lessons in how to avoid the act of storytelling).
Arriving at Haven
Benignly reversing the paradigm Twain move (which is downstream), Chaka and her friends travel north from Memphis up the Mississippi. There are deaths, obstacles. They reach Chicago. They travel east. They come to a larger domain, which is as fundamentally clement as Memphis. An aged inventor hires out to them, with his balloon; and they float to Haven. Where they find more books. There is a near-catastrophe. But most of the books are saved; and there are no more deaths.
The survivors return. They go back home. There have been marriages. There will be more.
There seems to be nothing to say about Eternity Road, except to praise the superbness of its articulation of peace. Peace, elegy, return;
recognition. It is something like John Crowley's Engine Summer (1979), on parole.
But it is slightly more complex than that. By treating the
post-catastrophe period as SF backstory -- which is absolutely what he has
intended to do -- McDevitt has transformed that backstory into what, in
fantasy terms, might be called a Matter: which may be defined as the true
story, the veridical myth of origin, of a nation or people.
The Matter of Britain is Arthur.
The Matter of America -- as Jack McDevitt renders It -- is Catastrophe.
It is a story which will only be told by the children of the children of
the original survivors.
We who are now alive will never live to tell that story. On the other
hand, it could be that we'll live to be the Matter.
John Clute is a writer, editor, critic and scholar of science fiction. He is the author of the Hugo Award winning Illustrated Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, as well as one of the co-founders of the British SF publication Interzone. His criticism and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post, Omni, the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and other places too numerous to list. His latest book, Look at the Evidence, has been nominated for the 1997 Hugo Award.
