Book Review: Eternity Road

Eternity Road, by Jack McDevitt

Eternity Road is not a typical post-apocalyptic novel in that it is not set in the immediate aftermath of an apocalyptic event, but rather, like A Canticle for Leibowitz, it is set some hundreds of years in the future after the collapse of civilization (due to plague), and considers the problems of the restoration of science and our civilization. In McDevitt's Illyria, a city state in the Mississippi valley built near what we realize are the ruins of Memphis, the only technology that has been maintained are the guns. Almost all other traces of our civilization have been lost, except for a handful of books (the collapse occurs in the 2070s, so most books were on computer, and the intervening several hundred years of barbarism has meant that few books survived). There is legend of a place called Haven, where numerous books were stored before the collapse. An adventure to find Haven ended in failure -- or so we believe, until a young woman inherits an extremely rare artifact from the only survivor of the quest -- a copy of Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. This spurs a new quest to find Haven.

The book is a quest story, with a party of adventurers setting out to find Haven. They wander throughout the Midwest, eventually making their way to the Great Lakes and eventually, to the Atlantic. They have some encounters along the way with some surprising artifacts that survived the collapse, and learn a lot about our technology. I won't ruin the story for you.

The book is somewhat anti-religious, and McDevitt does not come to the conclusion that Walter Miller does in Leibowitz, which is that the Catholic church would survive the fall and act as a catalyst to a new civilization (I happen to believe that it would). In this sense, it is "A Canticle for Leibowitz for Atheists". But this did not ruin the story for me -- the problem of reestablishing civilization from a handful of books is a compelling one, and McDevitt has many good insights.

Recommended.