Outbound

Outbound
Jack McDevitt
Isfic Press
ISBN: 978-0-9759156-4-6
Fiction, Science Fiction
Reviewed by Chris Gerrib

Isfic Press is a small operation, based in Deerfield, IL. Despite the size of the press, the books that they put out are huge. The latest release from Isfic is Outbound, a collection of short stories from Jack McDevitt. I highly recommend this work.
Jack has held many jobs, from Navy officer to Customs Inspector to teacher, and he uses all of them to fill out his work. In this book, he’s compiled sixteen simply outstanding short stories, any one of which would knock your socks off. In addition, he’s provided, in the Shots in the Dark section of the book, eighty pages of advice that are well worth heeding for any novice writer.
I’d like to talk about three of Jack’s short stories, all of which are simply astounding. The first is his story Melville on Iapetus. In the story, man has discovered a statue of an alien being, sitting on Iapetus, the outermost of Saturn’s largest moons. An expedition is dispatched to analyze the statue, and try to figure out why it was left. One of the astronauts, a woman named Terri, finally figures out why.
The second story, The Far Shore, is Jack’s second professional sale, and simply mind-blowing. In this story, we see a man marooned on an uninhabited, distant world. Alone, he attempts to continue his quest to find another civilization. He discovers one-his own. Two hundred light-years from Earth, radio signals from the start of World War II have just reached this world, and he listens to his past, one day at a time. Jack McDevitt grew up listening to these very same broadcasts live, and it shows in this masterful piece.
The last short story of special note is in collaboration with Michael Shara, an astrophysicist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. In this story, a young scientist conducts a catalog of brown dwarfs, small nearly-starlike objects, and discovers something that changes the world as we know it.
Isfic Press is not a big operation, and you’ll probably have to special-order this book, but I highly recommend buying Jack McDevitt’s Outbound.