Standard Candles: The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt
...Here's another writer who both is literary (meaning  stylistic, substantive, subtle) and knows his science.  He excels at  writing about people who do science.... McDevitt also has an eerie  ability to make the familiar strange.  If his characters mind-warp  themselves to another galaxy and find a civilization very much like our  own, in which the leading playwright seems to have plagiarized  Sophocles, that sounds just silly, doesn't it, like a bad Star Trek  episode?  We would expect the truly alien on a distant world.   McDevitt, far from being lazy, is one of the few writers ever to  contemplate how strange and disturbing the discovery of the non-alien  would actually be.  (He does it again in a story called "Black To  Move.")  ...  Here is an eloquent, challenging writer of short stories,  well worth discovering. --Aboriginal Science Fiction, Winter 1997