Eternity Road » (Reissue)

Jack McDevitt is the author of A Talent for War, The Engines of God, Ancient Shores, Eternity Road, Moonfall, and numerous prize-winning short stories. He has served as an officer in the U.S. Navy, taught English and literature, and worked for the U.S. Customs Service in North Dakota and Georgia.

The Roadmakers left only ruins behind — but what magnificent ruins! Their concrete highways still cross the continent. Their cups, combs and jewelry are found in every Illyrian home. They left behind a legend,too — a hidden sanctuary called Haven, where even now the secrets of their civilization might still be found.

Chaka's brother was one of those who sought to find Haven and never returned. But now Chaka has inherited a rare Roadmaker artifact — a book called A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court — which has inspired her to follow in his footsteps. Gathering an unlikely band of companions around her, Chaka embarks upon a journey where she will encounter bloodthirsty rirver pirates, electronic ghosts who mourn their lost civilization and machines that skim over the ground and air. Ultimately, the group will learn the truth about their own mysterious past.

VOYA

McDevitt's post-apocalypse novel is in the tradition of Andre Norton's Star Man's Son (Ballantine, 1952) and Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker (Summit, 1980). A thousand years in the future and hundreds of years after a global plague, remnants of the old world remain-roads, ruined cities, occasional bits of self-sustaining technology. A small band of explorers, led by a determined young woman named Chaka, leave their Republic of Illyria in the Mississippi River Valley and journey north and east to find the legendary Haven, where, according to tradition, the Roadmakers left a storehouse of knowledge. Along the way, they encounter ancient cities and technologies, pirates, a crazy balloonist, friends, love, and death. At times McDevitt's dichotomies between past and present are disconcerting: why should the Illyrians have kept the technology to make guns, for example, but lost the technology of the printing press? But the characters are appealing, the story moves along nicely, and the ending is not totally predictable. Mostly, teens will have fun knowing things the Illyrians do not-like where they are (Chicago, the Erie Canal) and what they are seeing (computers, cars, railways). VOYA Codes: 3Q 3P S (Readable without serious defects, Will appeal with pushing, Senior High-defined as grades 10 to 12).