It turned up in a North Dakota wheat field: a triangle, like a shark's fin, sticking up from the black loam. Tom Lasker did what any farmer would have done. He dug it up. And discovered a boat, made of a fiberglass-like material with an utterly impossible atomic number. What it was doing buried under a dozen feet of prairie soil two thousand miles from any ocean, no one knew. True, Tom Lasker's wheat field had once been on the shoreline of a great inland sea, but that was a long time ago—ten thousand years ago. A return to science fiction on a grand scale, reminiscent of the best of Heinlein, Simak, and Clarke, Ancient Shores is the most ambitious and exciting SF triumph of the decade, a bold speculative adventure that does not shrink from the big questions—and the big answers.

The Nebula Award–winning author of the Alex Benedict novels and the Priscilla Hutchins novels returns to the world of Ancient Shores in a startling and majestic epic. A working stargate dating back more than ten thousand years has been discovered in North Dakota, on a Sioux reservation near Devils Lake. Travel through the gate currently leads to three equally mysterious destinations: (1) an apparently empty garden world, quickly dubbed Eden; (2) a strange maze of underground passageways; or (3) a space station with a view of a galaxy that appears to be the Milky Way. The race to explore and claim the stargate quickly escalates, and those involved divide into opposing camps who view the teleportation technology either as an unprecedented opportunity for scientific research or a disastrous threat to national—if not planetary—security. In the middle of the maelstrom stands Sioux chairman James Walker. One thing is for certain: Questions about what the stargate means for humanity’s role in the galaxy cannot be ignored. Especially since travel through the stargate isn’t necessarily only one way...

The stars are ours. Again. After an effort to disable an ancient stargate discovered on Sioux land was stymied, the local people cooperated with Federal officials and others in exploring the strange worlds linked by the alien technology. Secrets old and new are uncovered but prove difficult to explain. Who built the stargate? What connection do the builders have with the worlds and intelligent species the various doors open to reveal? A millennia-old danger is uncovered by some of Jack McDevitt’s meticulously drawn characters in Doorway to the Stars, which is loosely connected to the author’s highly-praised novel Thunderbird. The exact nature of the danger is only slowly revealed, and exactly what humanity can do about it is a question weighing heavily on the minds of, eventually, everyone in the world. Scientists, bureaucrats, clergymen, and even a science fiction writer all have their ideas, but firm evidence is hard to come by.