First Sentence: “Wescott knew he was dead.”

How’s that for an opening sentence? This novel starts out with a prologue under the subtitle “1398, Rimway Calendar,” which may or may not be a date. Wescott, Margaret, and his daughter Delia are trapped with “the others” beneath tons of ice and snow that had avalanched over the ski chalet. He flashes back to meeting Margaret, presumably his wife, years ago aboard the Falcon.

Wescott and his family seem to be privy to a secret that will die with them if they don’t survive. “They can told nobody! Except Mattie. Mattie knew” (2).

Wescott’s thoughts are obviously panicked as he thinks of his family, their secret, and the possibility of escape. He remembers the walls of the chalet imploding with the force of the avalanche and that the floor had probably collapsed, putting him in the basement. Margaret had just left the dining room, Delia was sulking in their room on the third floor, other skiers were eating their breakfast when it happened.

At the end of the prologue, Wescott loses consciousness.

Chapter one starts with the subtitle, “1429, Thirty-One Years Later.” Now this novel is obviously set in the future: “The station was exactly where Alex said it would be, on the thirteenth moon of Gideon V” (5). The station is outfitted with basic telescopes and sensors, illuminated in a patchy orange by the dead star the moon orbited. It had “just become the third known outstation left by the Celians” (5).

The narration has switched from the third person to the first, “I” being a man named Kolpath congratulating a smug Alex for finding the station. The Celians are explained to have been a branch of the human family given to philosophy, art, and exploration, leaving their stations deep in strange galaxies. Following abrupt civil war and political chaos, the Celians are conservative and regressive.

After a page break on 7, the two men are in the Belle-Marie staring down at Gideon V. Alex trades and sells artifacts and seems to have a preternatural sense of finding ruins. He has made Rainbow Enterprises tons of money, which the narrator seems to have access to. They touch down on the moon amidst craters, ridges, canyons, and granite mountain ranges. The image is haunting and apocalyptic in the meager light thrown off by the gas giant which these moons orbit around. The base seems to be left in great condition despite their abandonment.

The two men disembark and touch down on the surface: the ground in crumbly with sand and iron chips, still pocked with footprints and vehicle tracks. Then Alex notices one of the station domes has been cut open, he starts mumbling about thieves and vandals. The thin layering of dust shows that this has happened only recently.

After another break on page 11, the two men have entered the station. The place has been ransacked—drawers pulled open, doors cut open, and glass broken all looking ghostly in the minimal light. There is nothing of value for the two businessmen to take. The only room not completely destroyed holds a small table with an open book: The Antiquarian Guide, to which Alex says, “Look as if the vandal knew we’d be here” (12).

Chapter two introduces Winetta Yashevik, the archeological liason and public relations chief at Survey, competition of Rainbow Enterprises. The narrator visits her, and she greets him with snarky cuts about his own brand of thievery. Winetta—Windy—is the only other person Chase, the narrator, has told about the Gideon V mission, but she promises she didn’t tell anyone of his planned excavation.

After a break on page 15, Alex is meeting with Fenn Redfield, an old police buddy of his. He says there’s no law against eavesdropping, but that Chase and Alex should invest in a phone scrambler. Over lunch, Chase and Alex decide to invest in a cryptosystem for more secure calls. Finding artifacts seems to be a cutthroat business.

There’s another break on 16, and the monetary success of Rainbow is owned up to Alex’s knowledge and integrity. Chase is his pilot and sole employee. The two men aren’t archaeologists, merely businessmen valuing artifacts as a source of income.

Alex interrupts Chase to say that the Gideon V artifacts have appeared on the market through Blue Moon Action—they are selling a gorgeous array of glassware, uniforms, and equipment bearing the Celian insignia. As Chase looks on, Alex calls the woman in charge at Blue Moon, grilling her about how she came by these artifacts. She says it’s a private owner who wishes to remain anonymous and that the full collection will be on display at the Antiquarian Caucus. The two men buy their tickets.

After a break on 18, the two men are attending the Antiquarian Caucus at the Medallion Gardens. Ms. Goldcress, the Blue Moon representative Alex had spoken to previously, is there and she is just as unhelpful as over the phone, still refusing to divulge any information about the Gideon artifacts’ owner.

At the subsequent banquet, Alex is regaled with questions about his famous forays, revealing he is a bit of a star in his field.

After a laudatory introduction by the banquet’s emcee, Oliver Bolton begins his speech. Apparently he’s even more of a celebrity in the field of artifacts. He talks about himself for a while, his archaeological finds, expedition disasters, also congratulating the other big dogs in the field. As Bolton is preparing to step down after his masterful speech, Casmir Kolchevsky stands. The audience murmurs—Kolchevsky is not a supporter of excavating for money. After a few minutes of calling the room a pack of thieves, he is dragged off by security. The narrator admires Kolchevsky’s effort.

After a break on 24, Alex and Chase are wandering the floor, sure that Goldcress’s client is among the crowd. However, the two men return to their hotel room empty-handed.

After returning home, Chase sleeps late. Once at the office, he returns a call to a local woman looking for an appraisal. He is skeptical since 99% of the local calls he gets are for junk picked up at estate sales. On the telephone screen, the woman, Amy Kolmer, holds up a cup with a strange language on it. The AI informs Chase that it’s English, mid-American, which would put the cup at 9000 years old. Chase suggests Amy bring it in, still skeptical.

At her appointment that afternoon, Amy flutters and primps, trying to flirt her way to a higher price with Alex. The computer puts the cup at about 2600 BE, reading “New World Coming” underneath an eagle, with a ships name. Alex hedges her questions about prices, asking her to leave the cup with them.

Once Amy has left, Alex lets loose his real opinion that someone would be willing to pay a hefty price to have this on their mantel. Ideally, it would have been aboard the ship itself. The chapter ends on page 29.

Chapter three begins with the hazy recollection of the Third Millennium, the approximate age of the cup. These historians of the future know about wars, leaders, assassinations, but rarely about rationale or public opinion. The two men are finding little information about possible ship names, English having been a slippery language.

Chase takes some virtual museum tours, contacts some professors specializing in the Third Millennium, and reads some data on the time period.

After a day of research, a professor contacts Chase, saying he has located the Searcher and that it would be worth Chase’s while to hear what he had to say. It can be assumed there’s a lot of money being unearthed from Amy’s cup.

Chase flies into Barcross, an engineered island where Professor Shep Marquard lives and works. After arriving on the island, Shep and Chase sit down to dinner at Benjamin’s, a lovely restaurant with a spectacular command of the sea. First of all, Shep says Seeker is the correct translation of the ship—hence the book title—and is probably the first ship built by the Margolians. This is an Atlantis equivalent: no one knows what happened to the Margolians and they sound more mythological than real. Shep says Chase couldn’t have found something better.

On page 36, Shep elaborates that the Seeker “left Earth December 27, 2688, carrying approximately nine hundred people,” but that the records aren’t very clear and there were few interstellar rules in that era. Earth has always been overpopulated and prone to dictators—Shep calls the social and physical environment “noxious.” Eventually, the Earth was lead by a theocracy and Harry Williams, the Margolian’s leader, decided that the only solution was escape and to create their own Eden in space. Before the break on page 40, Harry Williams and the Margolians hid where “not even God could find them,” and so far no one has.

Upon hearing about the Margolians and the Seeker, Alex is only marginally impressed. They ask Jacob, their AI, whether there have been any artifacts on the market associated with any of the Margolian ships, and there are only six verified items, none of which date from after their departure from Earth. Chase calls Amy and tells her not to tell anyone about the worth of the cup until she has ownership papers. They agree to meet for drinks so Alex can ask her some more questions.

The common wisdom of the Margolians is that they had died in space somewhere, rather than settling so far away that still no one had been able to find them.

Chapter four begins on page 45 on The Hillside, a posh club where the two men are meeting Amy. The minimum bid Alex tells Amy makes her cry, it’s so large. He tries to ask her ex-boyfriend’s name since he was the original owner of the cup, but she won’t budge. After some negotiation, Chase playing on her sensitivities about her break up, Amy finally breaks down and gives her boyfriend’s name: Cleve “Hap” Plotzky.

After a break on 49, it turns out that Hap is a burglar and not a very good one. Alex goes to see Fenn Redfield again, the police inspector, who states that Hap only steals jewelry. How he got his hands on such a rare cup is unknown on page 50.

Seeker is a masterful science fiction—introducing a completely knew world is always difficult and cumbersome. It’s easy to lapse into pages of exposition with little action, but McDevitt avoids this deftly. The prologue features people dying in an avalanche—the purpose of which is still unknown by page 50, there is an interstellar excavation and competing businesses, and the discovery of a cup that could belong to an Atlantis-style civilization lost for 9000 years. How’s that for action?

The introduction of space-age technologies is also cleverly done, merely mentioning the “telephone screen” and “police bots.”

The characters, however, aren’t very realistic to me. They seem two-dimensional in comparison to the richness of the plot. This might be a common weakness in science fiction.

Though Seeker is only one of 14 novels, it is definitely fast-paced enough to stand on its own as a debut. Especially right now, agents love books were things happen and this novel definitely dishes out the drama.