Rating: 
Summary: Decent, Worth a read
Review: OK Read... found it to be too much like the previous Hutch-based novel DEEPSIX, though - with too many "saved at the last second cliffhangers" (most of them somehow involving ropes and nets), making things just too unbelievable... like all this could really happen to one chick (Hutch), in just a few years time.
Rating: 
Summary: BORING WITH NO CLIMAX
Review: Overdrawn and very boring novel, where not much happens. You could easily skip over 200 pages in the middle of the book and miss nothing
Rating:
Summary: JUST TERRIBLE
Review: The author assembles and launches the most , boring, meandering, ill-planned first contact story I have ever read. The first 100 pages!!! yes 100 pages is character development. NOTHING HAPPENS!! Its like a romance novel with no romance for 100 pages. Then the characters actually discover ancient civilizations and stomp around on valyuable archaeological sites time after time. Every other page filled my head with screaming thoughts such as, "Come on!", "These are the stupidest people!" and "This book would fit nicely in a fire." They bumble through first one contact with an alien species and then another. They dismiss the first one because they are supposedly primitive savages, and seem to act as if they warrant no further study (even though the "savages" have a city and obvious culture)(Their sole evidence that they are "primitives" is because they attacked the idiotic landing party. Then you might as well name me a primitive because if these buffoons landed near my house I'd gnaw on their asses too).
After that debacle, they continue following the bread crumbs to another contact. After massacring themselves during their first idiotic contact they should have been corralled by whatever passes for a government. BUT NO! They are allowed to fly on and blunder into another advanced species. When I wasn't thinking about how implausible the plot was and how foolish the thoughts of the characters, I was noticing that I was reading pages and pages of absolute NOTHING. This book is 500 pages and it serious was about 400 too long. No joke, 100 pages could have covered this mistake and saved me a few hours of my life.
Go to hell all you morons who gave this 5 stars which precipitated my purchase.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting, but tedious; insufficiently believable
Review: The basic premise of this book is really quite fascinating -- explorers from Earth discover a network of "stealth" satellites transmitting data from dozens of habitable worlds. The intrepid explorers follow the network to see what's behind it. Unfortunately, the book draws things out much longer than is necessary. The length would have been worthwhile if there were more character or plot development, but this was too much length for too little reward. And worst of all, characters are dying off in droves because of truly implausible bad decisions one after another. How many times can one group of characters be expected to say "What's the worst that can happen?"? There's a delightful twist at the end, but I'm not going to read the next book just to find out where it leads.
Rating: 
Summary: Up with McDevitt's best.
Review: The third book in the "Hutch" series. This is another tale of a survey team tracking down aliens ... this time, advanced ones. McDevitt excelled himself in this book creating world after interesting world and mystery after mystery to solve. Real sense of wonder stuff. The milieu of the series is interesting: a fairly mature human race, settled, not really expansive... maybe extended lifespans breeds conservatism, or maybe I'm reading too much into it: all the characters in his books are among societies elite in government, business or science, you don't get much of a glimpse into the lives of ordinary people in this series. I'm looking forward to the final book in the series "Omega".
Rating:
Summary: A Long, Long Journey Into Space
Review: The time is about 200 years from now. Faster-than-light travel is routine. Space ships can be managed by a crew of one (plus a very advanced, talking computer). There is not much left to discover and humankind has grown a little bored with space travel. Disappointingly, we have not found any aliens out there to converse with. Only some ruins and one semi-intelligent race, the Noks. Then, an unexplained radio transmission gets everyone excited. And see, there's this organization--The Contact Society--that will do almost anything to prove that there ARE alien intelligences out there! Priscilla Hutchins is a star-ship captain who is getting tired, and wants to retire. She reluctantly agrees to make one last trip, hired by the Contact Society to take them on a jaunt of discovery, and follow that mysterious signal. After a number of mishaps caused by impulsivity and poor judgment, they find the Chindi, a ghostly thing/machine/whatever zooming through space. And of course, they have to pursue it, break into it, tramp around in it, and maybe get themselves killed. Not very scientific but hey, it's fiction. That, in a nutshell, is the plot. The book takes a long time getting up to warp speed. In fact, nothing much happens for the first hundred and fifteen pages. If you can stay with it, the book eventually hits its stride and becomes quite entertaining. If old fashioned sci-fi and space adventure is your thing, then you should definitely read Chindi. Reviewed by Louis N. Gruber.
Rating:
Summary: Good fun - but don't think too hard
Review: There are only 40 superluminal (faster than light) starhips in existence. So for first contact, imagine the effort being conducted on what is essentially a private yacht manned by ONE person to operate it and some odd passegners including a TV starlet and an undertaker. Imagine that these people encounter aliens and alien things and never think that ANY of them might be dangerous - even after a few of them get killed off by doing stupid things.
Imagine your entire plan for first contact is saying "hello, we come in peace" in English on the radio and giving out cheap jewelry.
Not a bad book, just don't think too hard.
Rating:
Summary: McDevitt continues to surprise
Review: There are so many good things to say about this book that I barely know where to begin. Maybe it's best to start with the fact that CHINDI is the kind of science fiction I read when I was growing up in the '50's -- science fiction that left the reader with a sense of wonder and the satisfaction that the adventure came to a workable conclusion.
More important is the book is one that I would leave someplace where a thirteen-year-old neice or nephew would find it and read it, thinking I hadn't meant for that to happen. And maybe that's what science fiction is supposed to be about -- giving the younger genertion that sense of wonder that can come from a story far more imaginative than the plethora of video games that portray graphic violence as a way of life.
And speaking of imagination, McDevitt does a lot with system-building, showing the reader a planetary system that could not exist naturally, but leaving the reader to ponder the questions: Okay, who built the system and where are they now? The fact that he doesn't answer those questions leaves plenty of room for the reader to imagine possible scenarios.
The chindi, obviously, is the best of all the gimmicks. More interesting than Rama, it is an asteroid turned into a spaceship/museum that is only a part of a larger system of interstellar snoops. Who built the chidi, and the snooping devices, is another mystery that goes unanswered.
Taken as a whole, the plot moves rather slowly, and the actions of some of the characters are simply infuriating. Certainly, there are people in the story who should be smart and noble and reasonable -- and aren't. Unfortunately, people are like that in real life, but we don't want them to act that way in the novels we read. Maybe the fact that Hutch, even though she has warned people to stop being stupid, risks her life to save them is what makes McDevitt's protagonist so attractive and, in her own way, noble.
Finally, it seems that McDevitt sees the universe as a place that doesn't consider humanity 'special' in any way, nor is it the slightest bit interested in our little dramas. It may not be the most comfortable philosophy, but it's probably the most realistic.
Rating:
Summary: Decent First Contact Novel
Review: This is a fairly good first contact novel. McDevitt is a competent writer with a good imagination. In this book, he has incorporated the plot device of having the heroine's search for companionship mirror the search for extraterrestrial civilizations. The book displays good imagination and the basic plot device of discovering an advanced civilization systematically eavesdropping on emerging civilizations is clever and developed well. As commented by other reviewers, this book is too long. The plot elements become a bit gimmicky and the characters aren't developed well enough to sustain this length book.
Rating:
Summary: Very Entertaining although somewhat constructed
Review: This is a great scifi story. Very entertaining, and a true page turner. When I finally finished it, it kept me up until 5am. The story is pretty well laid out and makes sense within the world constructed by McDevitt. However, there are some limitations as far as how "realistic" it is. People too easily take risks and enter alien worlds as casually as one would enter the public library. However, McDevitt sticks to the world he creates and is fairly consistant within it, which (if you can accept its "cowboy" nature), makes for an entertaining story. If you like scifi, you should enjoy this one!
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