Book Review: Omega

This past week I finished reading my November book. [OK, I'm behind schedule.] It is a book I had read before; it was the first of Jack McDevitt's books, and reading it inspired me to pick up the entire series and start from the beginning. Nevertheless, I had forgotten many of the details, and the story is well written, so it was interesting to read again. The book?

Omega
Author: Jack McDevitt

Omega is the fourth book in the Priscilla Hutchins series, set in Jack McDevitt's vision of the future where humanity has faster-than-light travel, but such travel is still relatively rare, and used primarily for research.

The core drama of Omega centers on a destructive phenomenon discovered in earlier books, called Omega clouds, which threaten a newly discovered intelligent race of beings. Intelligent races turn out to be exceptionally rare in McDevitt's cosmos, and the human race still has only found two or three other races of some intelligence, and none with whom the humans can establish relations or from whom they can learn.

The race discovered in Omega also turns out to be far inferior technologically, but they are very intriguing to the people back on Earth, and are quite sympathetic characters, worth an attempt to save from destruction.

McDevitt again introduces excellent, fully developed characters for his readers to get to know. He lays out mysteries to be solved with science, and shows the ingenuity of mankind when faced with difficult problems. He also makes clear that space is dangerous; we know that some of our favorite characters will fall, and they do.

Though I found the scientific mysteries less provocative in Omega than in the previous books, the story itself was completely engaging, and the primary heroes of the story were intelligent and human, particularly Digby (Digger) Dunn, Kellie Collier and David Collingdale. Ultimately, they represented the reader very well in the discoveries and trials they faced, and they reacted and grew in very human ways. Omega is not as "edge of your seat" suspenseful as the prior three novels, but over all I liked it better than Chindi. Omega does not require that you have read the first three to enjoy it, so though I would definitely recommend starting with Engines of God, a reader who is more interested in anthropology than physics might well enjoy this one more.