(Originally posted on Facebook in 2024)

This was actually a reread. Between 1998 and 2015, McDevitt appeared on the Nebula Award shortlist pretty much every year. Clearly, there was something going on, because his books are at best merely okay.

A Talent for War (1989, USA) is the first book of the Alex Benedict series, and is set in the 116th century – not that you would know it: there is FTL and Earth-like planets and AI and holograms, but every planet is pretty much the same, with some sort of vaguely twentieth-century US culture. In fact, take away the spaceships and the novel isn’t even science fiction.

Benedict’s uncle dies in a liner disaster, and Benedict discovers he’d been investigating the last days of the war with the alien Ashiyyur. A small fleet of frigates, led by Christopher Sim, a history teacher and self-styled military leader, fight an unexpectedly successful series of battles against the aliens, which eventually brings other more powerful worlds into the war, and ultimately leads to the creation of the Confederacy. Benedict’s uncle had been looking into the myths surrounding Sim, and it soon transpires there are people who don’t want the truth to come out.

A Talent for War is a fast read, and the mystery part of it is reasonably well done… but the world-building is meagre and unconvincing. Sim sees himself as some latter-day Spartan and there are numerous references to Hellenic Greece. Yet we’re supposed to believe that 9,500 years from now they have better documentation about Thermopylae than they do about their war 200 years earlier.

McDevitt has written a further eight Alex Benedict novels, the latest published in 2023. Some of them might be actual sf.