Return to Glory

Dust jacket illustration by Edward Miller

We're pleased to present Return to Glory, a huge (200,000 words) collection by Jack McDevitt, that gathers thirty-two tales, many famous, many rare, from throughout his four-decade career as one of science fiction's finest practitioners.

About the Book:

Jack McDevitt’s passion for astronomy was recognized in 2008 when the International Astronomical Union put his name on an asteroid. NASA has given him an award for “keeping the science in science fiction.”  Stephen King described Jack as the “natural heir to Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke.”  

Life is full of mysteries. Or at least, Jack’s fiction is. His earliest story, “The Emerson Effect,” shows how a hundred-year-old package that had been lost in the mail turns up at a post office and changes the lives of two clerks. In “The Big Downtown,” why do three people take a sailboat out into the bay when a hurricane is moving in? In “Tau Ceti Said What?” we send an automated mission out to the star, which is twelve light-years away, so far the ship required fifty years to get there, what might it see so unnerving that we’d try to keep secret that there’d even been a message?

In “Riding with the Duke,” Jack shows us how much fun TV may be in the near future. And might we really live in a universe where, somewhere, every possibility occurs? And would that be a good thing? “Standard Candles” asks the question. In “Timely Visitor” we encounter a time traveler from the past who seeks to have her work recognized. “Return to Glory” suggests the possibility that Star Trek may actually give us the Enterprise.

“The Cat’s Pajamas” examines what the crew of a starship may risk to rescue a stranded feline. And a senator’s conversation with an AI that doesn’t do much more than answer phone calls and announce visitors leads to a crisis in “The Wrong Way.”   

These and twenty other rides into the unknown await the reader.

Limited: 1000 signed numbered hardcover copies

From Locus Magazine:

“Jack McDevitt has been producing SF for more than four decades now, two dozen novels and enough shorter work to fill five previous collections with remarkably little overlap on the contents pages. Now there is a substantial sixth retrospective volume, Return to Glory, which gathers 32 stories from the whole long stretch of his career, from 1981 to 2022, and adds five pieces new to this volume… I’ve come to see the intertwining of the cosmic, the mundane, and the domestic, of ambition and recognition of our limits, as a McDevitt hallmark, a way of understanding with what Robert Frost calls ‘our place among the infinities’” And like Frost, McDevitt seems to recognize that even when we look up at the stars, we are standing on our own feet, on the ground where we remain rooted.”

Table of Contents:

• Dangerous Information: An Introduction by Tom Easton

Unlikely Gifts

• The Emerson Effect
• The Jersey Rifle
• Voice in the Dark
• Tau Ceti Said What?
• The Oppenheimer Club
• What’s the Point of Being Alive If You’re a Tree?

Deep Space

• Tidal Effects
• Standard Candles
• The Cat’s Pajamas
• Enjoy the Moment
• Arcturean Nocturne
• Tea Time with Aliens
• Cosmic Harmony
• The Gold Signal

High Hopes

• Crossing Over
• Holding Pattern
• The Big Downtown
• Return to Glory
• The Sunrise Club
• Good News

Incoming Tech

• Variables
• Eyes on the Prize
• The Eagle Project
• Riding with the Duke
• The Wrong Way
• Bring On the Night

Looking Back

• Leap of Faith
• Lake Agassiz
• The Cassandra Project
• Dig Site
• Excalibur
• Timely Visitor