Archaeologists are excavating an important site on a planet that is due to be terra-formed. Planet Earth is an eco-disaster area and mankind needs to move out. But the universe is not empty of life. Primitive cultures still exist on another world and there are the remains of some major space faring civilisations around scattered around the galaxy. There is also growing evidence of a pattern of repetitive disasters, of biblical proportions, on several planets that appears to destroy whole civilisations.
The hunt is on to follow the clues, discovered at the archaeological sites and subsequently interpreted, to discover the cause of the disasters, whether any of these civilisations have survived and if there are any implications for Earth.

I was rather enjoying the first part of the book. There was a mixture of intrigue and drama with slow character building but it all stops half way through when the story shifts to another planet. Here the story seems to speed up and gets shallower. Some of the drama is absurd because of the blatant stupidity of the characters involved. The science is also shaky.
I started thinking that this book was to be one of a series, the first in a trilogy perhaps. But when the pace sped up in the second half, I got the sinking feeling that the conclusion was coming.

It is a good story but too rushed at the end. Shame.

For me, the plot started to collapse in on itself slightly in the second half of the book. On moons orbiting the important sites they visit are huge, fake cities (dubbed Oz) laid out in obsessively straight lines and right angles which have suffered serious charring at times of planetary catastrophe from an unknown source. Apparently, the inexplicable cosmic force they eventually get a look at has an innate attraction to linear geometries-this part of the story, which becomes very important toward the end, seemed a little ludicrous to me. Another thing that bothers me is that, aside from Hutch, the other characters who survived until the end seemed to be the least important and inscrutable of the bunch. McDevitt has no qualms about sacrificing major characters at any time and any way; it's refreshing to see an author do that, but it is sometimes slightly frustrating to finally get to know a character and then see him/her dispensed with rather arbitrarily. This leads to another weakness in the novel. I did not think the character development was very good, especially that of Hutch. McDevitt always seems to want to add a touch of romance and smoldering desires to his books, and in this case it detracts from my admiration from Hutch. She is a brave, heroic woman, yet she can't go on a mission anywhere in the universe, it seems, without at least one former or hopefully future love interest. McDevitt just doesn't handle this type of emotional content well here, and it detracts somewhat from a great story.

I think this book made McDevitt a better writer. The flaws that seem to stand out in this effort are much less prominent in his later novels. I felt pretty good about this particular plot up until the fourth and final section; at that point, some of the science seemed to fall apart, and the ultimate conclusion comes off as somewhat improbable and anticlimactic. Some of the decisions made on all sides along the way are incredibly criminal and oftentimes juvenile, and the same mistakes (such as the continued exploration of alien worlds with little or no weapons) have a way of repeating themselves over and over again. I remained incapable of buying into the supposed purpose for the strangely hewn alien Oz sites, and since the final section's activity was based around a scientific interpretation of those sites' significance, the final pages left me somewhat nonplussed. Flawed as this novel is, though, it is certainly a science fiction adventure worth taking. Hutch is a fascinating character whose richness does not really come through in these pages as it does in the follow-up novels Deepsix and Chindi, but this is a more than worthy introduction to her noble character. Sometimes I feel like McDevitt is taking me somewhere I have already visited with him in the past, but I am more than happy to follow him each and every time.

It does not however, go into more detail than is (seemingly) necessary to drive the rapidly developing storyline. While this provides a fast ride, the reader is left yearning for more information about McDevit's mysterious universe.

The main story line kept my interest in that it focuses on characters that aren't the usual "space-professionals". We aren't given too much to go on concerning their inner workings or backgrounds however - the story being fast paced and characterizations more dialogue-driven than descriptive.

I eagerly awaited the return to "The Engines of Gods" central puzzle in the follow-up, Deepsix, only to be disappointed to find that the glimpses of lost civilisations - and the fascinating galaxy-wide drama we take part in "The Engines of God" is more or less treated as a footnote. Major frustration.

Let's hope McDevit begins to tie up some of the intriguing loose ends concerning his "lost civilisations", why they really disappeared and what it all means for his alternate "future history" - in some future effort!