Mare Somniorum

And so we reach the end of the Hutch / Academy saga.  The sixth and last installment is “Cauldron”, and after finishing it one can’t help but feel that McDevitt has been as much a part of this journey as we have.  In “Cauldron” we now have an improved engine, we can visit the core of the galaxy, we can truly reach out to the stars and we do just that.

We visit several worlds, each visit something that once would have been a book onto itself.  We have miniature versions of previous books (“Deepsix” and “Omega” both) but in “Cauldron” McDevitt has changed his focus.  We’re no longer looking outwards, we’re not looking at the external action.  As we throw away the chains of distance, as the stars open up to us, we start looking inwards.  We start to question ourselves.

And that’s what this work is about.  It’s about how we are affected by the journeys we’ve done, how we’re affected by the fact that space is opened up to us, how our conceptions and desires change when our possibilities change.  To begin with I felt a bit surprised at all this, especially as I’ve said before that I’ve always felt McDevitt to deliver a specific “realm” of storytelling that was a well known to us.  With “Cauldron” he moves even further towards Clarke as the outside world becomes little more than a backdrop for us to question ourselves.

Does he succeed?  Yes, I think he does.  I’ll admit to having my doubts while reading it, and that I actively had to reevaluate the book in hindsight, but it *is* a good book.  We’re left off with the tail end of a saga not only about the adventures of Hutch, but also of how her world, in every way, now has changed.  And with it, we change as well.