The Archaeology

Of an Ending

Book Cover

THIS REVIEW

CONTAINS SPOILERS!!

Science Fiction books about Archaeology are frankly rather rare. Despite the romance of popular versions of Archaeology, the discipline is plain hard work and very unromantic. One of its chief characteristics is the sheer hard work and tedium involved in doing a dig and classifying and analysing what you find. Very little of archaeology is King Tut’s tomb, or Indiana Jones style grave robbing.

As an aside here Indiana Jones as an archaeologist is a pretty bad one. He is frankly nothing better than a grave robber and treasure hunter and not very good at it either. But of course Indiana Jones is great fun to watch for a bit a mindless popcorn fluff to while away a dull afternoon. As an introduction to archaeology he and the movies the character is stuck in are nonsense.

Since real archaeology is from most peoples perspectives a lot of drudgery and tedium it is rather hard to make it exciting and at the same time preserve some level of connection with the real thing. This brings us to the book I’m reviewing.

The book is John Brunner’s Total Eclipse.1 The book combines two interests of mine Science Fiction and Archaeology.