OK late entry in the Academy / Priscilla Hutchins series, undercut by several auctorial decisions. Half the book is about getting Earth back into interstellar travel. I took this as a thinly disguised retelling of our history with moon exploration. There's not much point to this. The more time spent on Earth, the more time you can see that McDevitt has trouble imagining anything but the present. AIs play a bigger role than I recall, both in the home and in the spaceships, but otherwise the trappings of Earth are contemporary. The second bad decision was to take the mission to find the origin of the Omega Clouds and turn into into a multi-stop tour of several other systems along the way. This turns what could have been an extended focus on the omegas into a stop and go sequence of stories. The reason for this may be that -- no spoilers I think -- the explanation finally given for the omegas is pretty limp.

That said, it's nice to see Priscilla in space again, and the writing chugs along, never surprising, but passable.

Recommended for fans of McDevitt. ( )

(2007) As PW says this is not one of McDevitt's better books. Easy read but that is part of the problem. Too many pat scenarios and things happen too easy, even the end where the ?evil? omega cloud is defeated.From Publishers WeeklySpace opera specialist McDevitt shoehorns two traditional SF plots into his latest Academy novel (after 2006's Odyssey), doing both stories a disservice. Youthful physicist Jon Silvestri persuades the philanthropic Prometheus Foundation to back tests of a risky interstellar drive that's vastly superior to current technology. Soon series keystone Priscilla Hutchins finds herself aboard a newly outfitted ship dispatched to the galactic core, seeking the source of a million-year-old interstellar menace. The cast is uniformly likable if prickly, but no true protagonist emerges from McDevitt's ensemble. Some sections are leisurely, others rushed. Readers see little of the star drive research, and the space voyage is triply sidetracked¥to a planet of cheerfully technophobic aliens, an abandoned world with unexpected dangers and a black hole with a tantalizing secretÂ¥before reaching its stated objective, where the threat's origin is summarily introduced and disposed of in the last 60 pages. Despite considerable inventiveness and an enthusiastic pro-space agenda, the story remains superficial, especially frustrating from a writer of McDevitt's caliber.

One of the better books of the series. Ties up loose ends. Questions the fate of civilizations. Has multiple characters and explores their motivations. I did not care about the last point.

The story is told from shifting points of view of the various characters. I could have done without that aspect also, but I guess it breaks things up and lends variety to the telling while at the same time gives insight to the characters. It also allows the author to shift the point of view in some situations to heighten the suspense. If he was locked into one point of view the reader would end up knowing what was going on to that individual character at all times and there would be no suspense about the outcome. Given the shifting point of view, the reader is sometimes left guessing. ( )

A solid conclusion (for now) to the Academy series.

Following from Omega, the Academy is basically dead (lack of funding / interest) and humanity is withdrawing from the stars. Then there's a breakthrough in new FTL drive technology orders of magnitude faster than the previous incarnations. Hutch returns as one of the two pilots sent out on a high speed mission to the origin of the Chindi, a world SETI received a transmission came from, a black hole, and the possible origin of the Omegas (finally).

On the upside: we finally got something in the way of answers for both where the Chindi and the Omegas came from. It's by no means a complete answer, but more than we've had thus far. I'll take it. The addition of the new drive technology promises to really shake things up. I hope this isn't the last book in the series--I want to see where this universe goes, now that you can fly to the galactic core in about four months... (As an aside, space is *huge*).

On a slight downside, some of the stops really felt undeveloped. What could have been an entire book earlier in the series was only a chapter or two. Even so, I think this book had the best flow of the six; I finished it in a day. ( )

I am generally a big McDevitt fan, but I found this title to be a bit slower than most of his other books. Still enjoyable, but not at the top of my list of favorites. ( )