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Type of bind: Mass Market Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN num: 9780061020063
ISBN number: 0061020060
Label: Eos
Manufacturer: Eos
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 528
Printing Date: January 01, 2002
Publishing house: Eos
Release Date: January 08, 2002
Sale Popularity Level: 150420
Studio: Eos
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
In the year 2204, tragedy and terror forced a scientific team to prematurely evacuate Maleiva III. Nineteen years later, a rogue moon hurtling through space is about to obliterate the last opportunity to study this rare, life-supporting planet. With less than three weeks left before the disaster, superluminal pilot Priscilla 'Hutch' Hutchins -- the only even remotely qualified professional within lightyears of the ill-fated planet -- must lead a small scientific team to the surface to glean whatever they can about its lifeforms and lost civilizations before time runs out. But catastrophe awaits when they are stranded on this strange and complex world of puzzles and impossibilities. And now Hutch and her people must somehow survive on a hostile world going quickly mad -- as the clock ticks toward apocalypse for a doomed enigma now called...
Amazon.com Review:
Deepsix is concerned with the motivating force that drives all scientists--the quest for truth, for expanding the limits of human knowledge. How much are we willing to risk for that moment of discovery, of knowing what no other soul yet knows? Our time? Our reputations? Our careers? Our lives?
The premise is this: just weeks before the planet Deepsix will be destroyed by a collision with a gas giant, ruins are detected on its surface, suggesting the presence of civilization. The Academy diverts scientists from the nearest spaceship to go down and explore, and they are joined by their century's Ellsworth Toohey: a misogynistic, sanctimonious gadfly who has never before been off of Earth's surface. The party's landers are destroyed in an earthquake induced by the approaching gas giant, so now they must find a way to get off of Deepsix before it is destroyed by the collision. Needless to say, their excavations are placed on the back burner.
The physics describing the space travel and the archeology used to reconstruct the lost culture of Deepsix are interesting and explained well. There is plenty of action and suspense--will the party survive? And the evolving characters and group dynamics are more complex than those usually found in science fiction books, making Deepsix a worthwhile read. --Diana Gitig
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
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Deepsix is situated in the same universe as The engines of God. With pilot Priscilla Hutchins participating in both novels one would expect a continuing storyline about finding alien artefacts and the search for their creators. A concept with great potention as we know from Alastair Reynolds novels. But where in Reynolds books artefacts lead to exiting intrigues with dangerous entities, in McDevitts stories they only seem to serve the purpose of letting a group of archaeologists find ways to bring themselves into ridiculous dangerous circumstances.
The question I had after reading Deepsix is: Where was the editor? McDevitt knows how to write a story, no question about that. The only problem is: he does not know when to stop!
Due to a very unlikely incident a group of people gets stuck on a planet that will be destroyed within several weeks. With another 350 pages to go the reader KNOWS that all attempts to rescue the party will fail until the very last pages. What follows is a very unlikely repetitive chain of events of clumsiness, treachery, bad luck, and plain stupidity preventing any rescue. It's just too much. And the successful endeavor is at the same time the most unlikely possibility. It simply cannot be done that way! Not given the circumstances. But it never should have come that far...
After the very first 150 pages the editor should have intervened. Telling the author to write about 2 storylines: one with a rescue party underway, and one about finding hidden artefacts, clues about the race of builders from the Engines of God, a potential danger, whatever... Forget about dull archaeology and let those artefacts come alive!
Rated by buyers 
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Well, who could resist a novel about folks stranded on a planet that is about to collide with a massive gas-giant? There's a scary thought: very first there'll be massive hurricanes and tsunamis, then quakes will split the land, lava will spill over and the oceans will be ripped into the sky. (And you thought OUR planet had problems?)
So it's a great storyline, but I wish some other author had written it. I have read several of McDevitt's books and they all shared the same flaws.
For starters: there is way too much time spent on mundane details and unimportant characters such as corporate flacks, newshounds and academic department heads. I get the impression the author has spent his life in Academia, immersed in professorial infighting. And I'm not interested in reading about it.
McDevitt should have red-pencilled large tracts of prose about these peripheral issues, and used the space for what a reader really wants to see: actual descriptions of what this doomed world looks like. It is an alien planet with its own flora, ecology and even alien ruins, but the sense of wonder is curiously lacking. The author has not given me the sensory details to engage my imagination. McDevitt's alien worlds are mostly backdrops, with an obligatory flesh-eating insect or "alien temple" thrown in.
Another frustrating thing about McDevitt's writing is that his plots rely on people behaving stupidly. In this novel as well as other ones, characters take insane risks with minimal precautions, and the rest of the plot hinges on one or several starships charging to the rescue. Much engineering wizardry is performed and described in mind-numbing detail as our heroes wait to be saved. It actually strains credibility that in a few centuries humans will travel to remote parts of the galaxy, and when they land in trouble, a nearby cruise-liner starship (with luxurious staterooms for tourists, no less) will come steaming to their aid.
Deepsix and a few others in the series remind me of an episode of Star Trek. As long as you overlook the cliche plotting, predictability and logical impossibilities, they provide a bit of light entertainment.
Rated by buyers 
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This is another Priscilla Hutchins novel. She had previously discovered the existence of the Monument Makers and a probably location for their homeworld.
This is more of a rescue mission book, as an orginal Deepsix mission gets into trouble with dangerous alien lifeforms, and then again, when Hutchins is involved another pull out is needed.
The planet is of interest because of signs of past life that had not been noticed before.
Rated by buyers -
Though not quite as good as its predecessor, *Engines of God*, *Deepsix* continues the exploits of Superluminal pilot Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins as she is diverted to the planet Deepsix, which is weeks away from being swallowed whole by a gas giant on a collision course. With a Gore Vidal-like passenger in Gregory MacCallister unwillingly in tow, Hutch must meet with a science team to help them solve the recently discovered mystery of Deepsix's dead advanced civilization before the clues are lost forever.
Twenty years earlier, a science party was mostly slaughtered by hostile life on the planet, and the only available scientist nearby to lead this new expedition is the disgraced commander of the first, lost expedition. To make matters worse for the party, oil and water collide as the commander holds a grudge against MacCallister for lambasting him publicly after the loss of the very first crew.
The adventure really heats up though when a tidal earthquake caused by the impending destruction of the planet tears the ground asunder and the party's lander is lost. With time running out and helpless sightseers in the system to witness the planet's demise, the team must trek across a dying planet to find a lost lander from the very first expedition and hope that it will provide them a way off in time.
But, this book is not all adventure, as we get a dose of McDevitt's intellectual science fiction as we also have opportunity to learn a little more about the Monument-Makers and Omega Clouds introduced in the very first book set in this universe.
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A Guide to my Book Rating System:
1 star = The fibre pulp would have been better utilized as toilet paper.
2 stars = Don't bother, clean your bathroom instead.
3 stars = Wasn't a waste of time, but it was time wasted.
4 stars = Good book, but not life altering.
5 stars = This book changed my world in at least some small way.
Rated by buyers 
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In the second novel in Jack McDevitt's Academy series, Prisilla Hutchins (Hutch) is back. Twenty years after the discovery of the home world of the Monument Builders in `The Engines of God', Hutch is sent to Maleiva III to perform a quick archaeological survey of the planet before it is destroyed by a collision with a gas giant. Remnants of an now vanished civilization are discovered there, and Hutch and her friends must find out as much as they can about them as quickly as possible. They have only three weeks to perform the survey before the planet and all traces of the indigenious civilization are destroyed. Things get real interesting when Hutch's ride off the planet is destroyed . . .
I'm surprised at the wide range of Amazon reviews for this novel. A few liked it, many thought it was a middlin' work, and a few hated it. I was absolutely riveted by this and read the entire book in two days, I couldn't put it down. I found the story to be compelling, the characters well developed, and much of the science plausible. This story is partly hard sci-fi, partly outdoor survival on an alien world, and partly an archaeological dig. The mystery of the natives is slowly revealed as Hutch and her stranded companions search for a way off the planet. This is much better than `The Engines of God' in my view. The interplay between the characters is more complex, and the characters themselves are better developed. There are a few places in the plot where things are just too coincidental, but this is a minor complaint. An engaging read, and one of the best in the hard sci-fi genre of the last decade that I've read.
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