The Engines of God

Jack McDevitt's science fiction novel The Engines of God was published in 1994. It is told from the viewpoint of Priscilla Hutchins, a starship pilot known as Hutch who flies for the Academy of Science and Technology.

Humans had proof that they were not alone: a statue of a two-legged alien was recovered on Iapetus, and faster-than-light travel then brought a series of vast Monuments to light around other stars. Their builders were never seen, and habitable worlds were scarce.

Only three cases of intelligence had turned up. On a ringed gas giant's moon called Nok, a non-human civilisation was still going, with technology much like Earth's a century or so earlier. The Earth-like world of the Quraquans had lost its people a few hundred years before, and a third planet had been emptied of its inhabitants nearly a million years earlier.

Earth itself was turning hostile, so Hutch's orders send her to Quraqua, where a terraforming company plans to melt the polar ice with nuclear charges and finish off ruins that a research team has spent three decades digging. The team has just found a carving that resembles the Iapetus statue, this time showing a Monument-Maker as a god of death, and the Academy fails to delay the work. Richard Wald, an expert on the Monuments, joins the flight, and on the way the pair inspect Oz, a city-like monument on the planet's moon.