BookLog: Chindi
Chindi, by Jack McDevitt
Summary: Humanity has developed FTL travel through the use of hyperdrive and has spread out through their corner of the galaxy. In doing so they've found the ruins of a lot of alien civilizations, and one sentient race that's been stuck at a feudal or nation-state level for a few thousand years and doesn't seem that they'll ever get out of it. No other space faring race has been found. Then a science mission funded by the "Academy" to do research around a neutron star briefly detects a signal that seems like it might be artificial in origin. The quickly lose track of the signal, and further attempts to regain the signal are unsuccessful for the next five years. Finally a second fragmentary signal is intercepted, and the Academy debates about the origins of the signal, proposing that there might be any number of natural causes for the signals. However the "Contact Society," a group of wealthy future UFOologist-types believes that the signals are of alien origin, and offers to fully fund a mission back to the neutron star if some of their members are included on the trip, to which the Academy happily agrees. Of course when they arrive they find that the Contact Society was right, and thus begins the adventure as they attempt to track the signal back to either it's origin or it's destination, passing through multiple star systems in the process.
It took me awhile reading this before I realized that it referenced at least a few of the author's other books that are apparently in the same universe. One of them I’d definitely read, another I’d either read and had really fuzzy memories of, or I’d read the book flap. I believe that the books I specifically recognized were "Deepsix" and "The Engines of God." There may have been others but if so I missed it. He's written a lot of books, which I’ve read a lot, but by no means all of. In any event, it gives a little about those prior books away, but not too much.
The author seems to have at least a passing interest in archaeology, it's been featured in several of his books, however I suspect that it isn't in very great detail, although not being an archaeologist I can't say for sure. I suspect that either he's only a hobbyist in the subject, or he doesn't want to burden the reader with anything other than the most obvious details. It usually doesn't go much beyond no-brainers like "stop poking at that alien artifact until a real archaeologist has had a chance to document it's position and condition!"
As you might guess from the focus on archaeology, the book falls in the middle of the "realistic" science fiction spectrum. Which means that although it has action and adventure in it, you better not mind characters dying from said action and adventure, just as they might in real life.
All in all the book was pretty good. I was always looking forward to getting a little more read when I went home from work, but I usually didn't get sucked in until odd hours of the morning reading "just one more page."
Oh, and on the off chance that anyone else reads this book, I’d appreciate it if you could take note of a couple details for me. I'm curious about some of the physics of hyperspace, and if the answers I’m looking for are in the book, skimming through it hasn't found them.
Do the FTL ships have one hyperdrive? Or can they have multiple hyperdrive units? If all the ships in the book have just one hyperdrive, is there anything mentioned about the physics of the system that prevents a ship from having two or more active hyperdrives? What about an active hyperdrive and one or more inactive backups?
What is the process of using the hyperdrive? i.e. do they turn it on to enter hyperspace and leave it on for the whole trip, and then turn it off to exit hyperspace? Or do they turn it on briefly to enter hyperspace, and then turn it on again briefly to exit?
Thanks for any tips.