Jack McDevitt’s The Engines of God is a novel of interstellar archeology. Earth has been devastated by global warming, and our exploration of the galaxy has only turned up a handful of “garden worlds” — planets comparable to Earth — that we can settle. We’ve also found ancient alien relics scattered around the galaxy, as well as evidence of the rise and fall of the otherworldly civilizations. This is the first of McDevitt’s “Academy” series of books.
As the novel opens, one of the garden worlds is about to be terraformed to make way for humanity, obliterating its cache of alien ruins in the process. A team of researchers is racing to learn whatever they can before the engineers fire the polar-cap-melting nuclear weapons.
It’s a decent book that can be overly bureaucratic in places, but ultimately offers a compelling intergalactic mystery.