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Customer Reviews (9)

A new low watermark for SF writing
Plenty of other reviews here go over the "plot" of this turkey. Warning: SPOILER ALERT. I'd like to tell you why this is one of the worst SF novels I've read in over 50 years.

Bova doesn't give us a single believable character, motivation or relationship.

Think about it. The bad guys want to do away with our hero. Since Wilie Coyote is not available, they come up with plan (a), which is to capture a British POW of the Japanese who was subsequently captured by the Russians and brainwashed (Korean Candidate style) so that he would feed PCP to a young astronemer and hyptnotize him into attacking Stone, who is a black belt in something dangerous. Plan (b) is to sneak a bomb onto a "tanker" rocket that's bound to rendevous with our hero nearly a million miles from Earth.What ever happened to knives, guns and poison? And, while we're at it, why do the bad guys want to kill our hero in the first place?

The British POW is presented as a cardboard characture. He doesn't talk like a real brit of that generation (like my mother).

And consider the love interest, Jo. Obviously a knockout, though we are left to imagine the details. Unaccountably in love with our middle-aged hero before the story starts. Strips and jumps his bones to prove she cares. Sleeps with the villian to protect her true love. Again, we have a villian without a clear motive. He's just nasty, fat, old, smelly and he has erectile disfunction. He pretty well drops out of the plot midway and all that pent up disgust the reader has developed for him is wasted.

Much of the action takes place at the Kwajalein base. Ben Bova has apparently never been to this base, which isn't much of a problem for readers since very few people have. But I was there at about the time this story takes place. As Bova walked me around his fantasy base, it just reminded how the entire story was just unwinding on automatic. Too bad. That base is a fascinating place. You write 100 novels about it.

At last, we have the grand finale in which Jo is reassured that Stoner really loves her. Stoner invests a few of his last words to testify that he's loved her from the beginning when we know that he completely ignored her at until their preposterous first love scene. Does anybody proof read these things?

If you subtract the vapid religious overtones, the political intrigue, the 14-year-old wet dream sex and the silly plots of implausible villians, you're left with a pretty good idea. Maybe enough for a short story. If you want a five star treatment of a very similar theme, check out "Camoflage" by Joe Haldeman.

Received quickly, in good condition
Have not had time to read it yet, looking forward to it.Ben Bova is a great writer and one of the best in science fiction. Book was delivered quickly, and is in good condition.

Great Read.
I really enjoyed this book as I do with most Ben Bova titles.I'm looking forward to reading the second in the series.

Not what it's advertised to be
"Voyagers" is the first book of the "Voyagers" tetralogy and the first novel of his I've read. The novel was published in 1980 (for the 2005 audiobook version, Bova apparently revised the text).

"Voyagers" is billed as a "First Contact" novel, putting it in the same subgenre as Arthur C. Clarke's classic "Rendezvous with Rama." However, that's where the similarity ends. Unlike "Rama," "Voyagers" takes place mostly on the ground. It doesn't even get into space until chapter 40. This is a Book with a Message. It's sort of a modern, modified morality play, and although secularized, the religious overtones are discernible: The protagonist's "arc" goes from idealism to cynicism and melancholy to exaltation and redemption by sacrificing his life in the name of a higher ideal (here comes the Message), which is: If only we humans could outgrow our outmoded beliefs, blind fanaticism, mindless rivalries and proclivity for violence, we could unite as a species and rise to even greater heights of achievement and inspiration.

"Voyagers" takes us back to another time: The Cold War is on, and the US and the USSR face off across the Iron Curtain. Scientists in both countries detect strange radio emissions from Jupiter. The US's space telescope, the Big Eye (this was about 12 years before the Hubble), sees an object in Jupiter space that can't be anything but a spacecraft. The alien spacecraft leaves Jupiter orbit and heads for Earth. This is kept secret by both countries until it can't be hidden anymore. A joint US-Soviet team rides a Soviet spacecraft on a course to rendezvous with the alien.

However, this is preceded by chapters 1-39, which detail the collision of the main characters' profoundly dysfunctional lives with Cold War political machinations, and the tone of the book is pretty sour. The main characters are three: Keith Stoner, whose life and career have gone downhill since his astronaut days; Kirill Markov, a philandering Russian ethnolinguist; and Jo Camerata, a gorgeous, voluptuous, promiscuous young graduate student with a heart of gold, after whom most of the male characters in the book lust at one time or another. (Oh yeah, lots of them in academia.) None of these characters is particularly likeable to begin with (they more or less redeem themselves by the end), but they seem like saints compared to a gaggle of thoroughly disagreeable supporting characters, who include Markov's harridan wife, a British scientist and double agent with electrodes in his head, a homosexual French cosmologist and Catholic priest, and a young Dutch astronomer addicted to PCP. There is a poorly developed subplot involving a fundamentalist preacher, and an absurd subplot involving Soviet mind control that seems lifted right out of "The Manchurian Candidate."

Technology and politics: Technology advances so fast that techno-tales like "Voyagers" date rapidly. We expect futuristic gadgets in futuristic novels. "Voyagers" takes us back to a time of primitive computers and no fax machines, cell phones, CDs, digital cameras, printers, the Internet, email, the GPS, and smart devices. Back in 1980 nobody except a few experts could have predicted that in another decade, communism would fall and the USSR would cease to exist.

When we finally get a gander at the alien, he is absurdly humanoid, with bilateral symmetry and a head and four limbs and ribs and so forth. Bova gets a number of things wrong about Russia. Inexplicably, Bova's editor didn't catch his complete mangling of Russian patronymics. Also, the Russian space program doesn't use countdowns; that's an American invention, borrowed from a movie. (At the risk of being a nitpicker:) Just before launch, an official message is transmitted to the crew and the media by the Soviet president. While that certainly would have been possible, on such a momentous occasion, the message would more likely have come from the Soviet prime minister, who with rare exceptions in Soviet history was also the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which was the office with the real power. Some Soviet leaders held all three posts at once! One detail that stretches credulity to the breaking point is that a Soviet scientist who is also a spy could possess a largish suitcase that contains top-secret Soviet mind-control equipment (powered by a RADIOACTIVE ISOTOPE) and get it through security when bringing it to an American base!

While Bova's prose moves pretty well, and this book may be enjoyable to really devoted sci-fi fans, I found it lugubrious (now there's a $2 word!) at the beginning, cloying in the middle, and sappy at the end.

We are not alone!
In the 1980s the world is still under threat of nuclear annihilation, memories of the Bay of Pigs nightmare are still fresh and the Cold War is still very much a fact in the world's political life. Carl Sagan is at the height of his popularity. UFO sightings still occur with astonishing regularity. SETI (the search for extraterrestrial intelligence) is making headlines in the popular scientific press. The right wing fundamentalist Christian movement in the USA is gathering a full head of steam and preachers with the oratorical skill of Billy Graham can pack a stadium to the rafters. Radio astronomy is a relatively new science. The Roman Catholic Church is sensing that it is a diminishing influence in the first world so it is looking to increase its flock by ensuring its power base in the third world is strong. A woman in a position of influence or power is a rare phenomenon. The "publish or perish" culture in scientific circles outside of the Soviet Union is in full bloom.

This is the world in which Ben Bova has a team of radio astronomers detect a signal in orbit around Jupiter that is clearly the work of an intelligent extraterrestrial species. No space opera, hard-boiled action or fantastic imagined scientific technology here, I'm afraid! Bova simply asks us to contemplate how a real 1980s world with 1980s technology would react if it knew that an intelligent space-faring alien creature was headed in a craft towards earth.

What a simple but effective premise for an engaging story!

On the down side, Bova has taken a purely melodramatic, almost laughably soap opera approach to the development of the relationships between his characters in the story. The men in the story are either heroes or wimps and the chauvinism that they exhibit toward the single strong female character in the tale is beyond outrageous. That said, Bova has created a provoking tale of the possible effects of a close encounter of the third kind on world politics, religion, relationships, science, culture and mainstream life in the USA.

Despite the fact that virtually everything about the story is now seriously dated, it is simple (and I would suggest useful) for the reader to examine today's world and ask themselves the very same question. What would my world become if I suddenly KNEW that we were not alone, that we were about to be visited by an ambassador of an intelligent species that was clearly possessed of technology well beyond anything we could produce and whose motives, culture and language were completely unknown to us?

I thank Ben Bova for providing me with a basis to contemplating that most provocative question.

Recommended. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (4)

Quick delivery, book as described
I have not had time to read it yet, but looking forward to it as I always enjoy Ben Bova. Book was delivered quickly, and in the condition as described.

A strong, important message in a singularly unimpressive wrapper!
A radio signal from a source near Jupiter announces to the scientists of this world that we are not alone. An intelligent extraterrestrial species is going to make a close fly-by to earth in a hyperbolic orbit of the sun that will allow one opportunity, and one opportunity only, to examine the starship, its occupants and its technology. In Voyager, the first novel of this trilogy, Keith Stoner, the American member of a joint US-Soviet mission to study the alien's ship, chose to stay aboard with the frozen alien's body. Knowing the rocket would rapidly move beyond the earth's ability to rescue him, he turned off his spacesuit's heaters and elected to flash freeze his body in the frigid temperatures of interplanetary space.

As Voyagers II opens, Keith Stoner awakes 18 years later in the laboratories of Vanguard Industries, the largest corporation on earth. Beyond all expectations, earth developed the technology to effect a rescue and somehow managed to revive his long frozen body from a state of suspended animation. His friend and erstwhile lover, Jo Camerata, using every resource at her disposal, has scrambled to the top of the industrial world. She is the President of Vanguard and her husband, Everett Nielsen, is the Chairman of the Board. Vanguard appears to be in control of the vast knowledge and technology that the alien and the spaceship have to offer and intends to keep it and use it for its own financial gain. However, Stoner, who has an unexplainable mental link with the alien intends to explore earth and ensure the technology is offered openly to a needy and unseemly venal world destined to encounter one global disaster after another.

When I reviewed Voyagers some months ago, I criticized Bova for taking a melodramatic, soap opera approach to the development of the relationships between the characters in the story. The men were portrayed as either heroes or wimps and the chauvinism with which he allowed his male characters to treat the females was simply beyond outrageous. Unfortunately, this weakness continues in Voyagers II and sinks to even lower lows. His dialogue is wooden and terribly contrived - not a great deal more realistic than one might expect from the humorous mangled English subtitle translations of Japanese B movies. The maniacal primary motivation for the evildoers of the novel seems to be world domination in a style that is not quite as subtle as the overlords of James Bond's arch-foe SMERSH.

Despite its glaring apparent weaknesses, Bova has nevertheless created a provoking tale of the possible effects of a close encounter of the third kind on world politics, religion, relationships, science, culture and mainstream life in the USA. The overwhelming need to use such advances in technology for the betterment of the world is obviously uppermost in Bova's mind and still makes Voyagers II an interesting read - if not one with an abundance of literary values. Which is certainly a shame! It isn't without merit but, as a novel, it's a bit of a disappointment.

Recommended, but only barely.

Paul Weiss

jacket summary
from the back cover of the January 1987 TOR paperback edition
cover art by Boris Vallejo
When Keith Stoner awoke, he found himself in a world changed almost beyond recognition.Eighteen years before, Stoner had been the American member of a joint US-Soviet mission to capture an alien ship, which had entered the solar system.It was the greatest adventure in the history of Earth-but disaster struck when a bomb placed on the Soviet craft forced its recall.Stoner refused to allow such a gift to escape humankind, and removing his spacesuit within the strange ship, fell into suspended animation.
Jo Camerata, the ambitious young student who fell in love with Stoner, is now head of Vanguard Industries.Jo's dogged determination has forced the recovery of the alien ship, and now her company is in control of the vast new technology and the fortune it reaps-and in control of Keith Stoner.What Camerata doesn't know, however, is that someone else has been awake; someone who dwells within Stoner's mind.The alien presence that has kept Stoner alive all these years is now free, and intends to explore our world.
And will let nothing stand in its way.

Foresight
I read this book when i was still in High School a number of years ago, but still the distinctness of the book lingers on in my memory. I enjoyed Sci-Fi before i read this book, and after? Well writing reviews and looking every where for Ben Bova. I enjoyed the book because it focused not only on what could be, what what in actual fact is. The Vanguard coorporation if my memory serves, reflects metaphorically with the way our world is now. It moved me from being being "a simple fish in the waters of life" to being aware of my environment, being aware that there is more than what meets the eye. The technology described in the book was, to me, fantastic, so fantastic that it tantalised the senses and made me want to go out and study science and make that technology possible. I have in my life only read three Ben Bova book, not by any chance by choice, but simply because where i am they are hard to find. Orion, another throughly enjoyable book, shares the same mystisism with Voyager 11, and also displays our Theological dispositions. Voyager 11, displayed the Alien that is within our very midst and the human potential that has only just begun to be tapped. Definitely one of the best books i have ever read. I question and because i cannot find the answer, i search. Thanks Ben.. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (6)

Saving Humanity
The Return (2009) is the fourth SF novel in the Voyagers series, following Star Brothers.The initial volume is this series is Voyagers.

In the previous volume, a nanotechnology plague was released into the population.The Star Brothers were spread to protect against the Horror.Then Stoner and his family flew to the stars.

In this novel, Keith Stoner has come home again from the stars with his wife and two children.But home has changed while they were gone.In fact, they seem to have slipped between timelines.

Raoul Tavalera has also come home again -- without his sweetheart Holly -- and it too has changed.His family is still there, but society has devolved into tyranny.

Angelique Dupre was born as Aretha Deevers in a tent city in Georgia.She changed her name after joining the Sisters of the Savior, a New Morality order.

In this story, twenty-two years ago, a starship entered the system and was tracked to the vicinity of Jupiter.Then it disappeared, but recently emitted messages from Earth orbit to scientists around the world.Naturally, the politicians, military chiefs and religious leaders suppressed these messages.

Keith is getting impatient with the political intransigence.His wife Jo tries to calm him down, but Keith is determined to contact leading scientists.He starts tinkering with the aurora borealis.

Raoul has recently returned from the Goddard habitat near Titan.He thought life back on Earth would be exciting, but finds it to be rather dull.The New Morality keeps interfering with his life.

Raoul finds his homecoming party to be a flop.People keep eyeing the surveillance scanners in the corners and talking low.When he takes his Mom out to the back yard, the scanners mounted on poles seem to watching them and she keeps watching them.

When Raoul asks about the Northern Lights shining overhead, nobody wants to talk about it.The police ask people to stay indoors at nights because of the emergency, but none know what the emergency is.His questions get him a free ride to a New Morality building in the west.

Raoul finds himself working for Sister Angelique.She discusses the Northern Lights with him.She mentions that the authorities fear that the public will see this expansion of the aurora as a sign of the coming of the end of the world.She wants him to help her investigate the situation.

Shortly thereafter, Raoul finds himself having a conversation with Keith in the starship.The surveillance cameras record him sitting quietly in his chair for many minutes.Angelique asks what he was doing and he tells her about Stoner.

From then on, Raoul becomes the middle man between the New Morality and Stoner.Keith appears several time near Raoul and is even recorded by the omnipresent cameras.Angelique takes Raoul to many meetings within the New Morality and with national politicians.

This tale links the Voyagers trilogy with the Planet series.But now the trilogy has a fourth volume.One wonders if the Orion stories will be linked as well.

This novel seem to conclude the Voyagers series, but maybe not the end of the Planet sequence.Leviathans of Jupiter appears to belong to that series.Read and enjoy!

Recommended for Bova fans and for anyone else who enjoys tales of highly advanced technology, political intrigue, and good Samaritans.

-Arthur W. Jordin

Too Predictable
Not Ben Bova's best.The plot is weak and predictable.Not nearly as entertaining as the Voyagers series I-III.This novel gives the Voyagers series closure, but, it's not up to Ben Bova's usual standards.

Great story. Slightly flawed page turner.
I enjoyed this story very much. I have not even read the other books in the series but I felt the book stood well on it's own. It is the story of Raoul Tavelara and Keith Stoner. As human civilization is about to destroy itself, Keith has returned from the stars with his family to bring a warning. Will human kind head the message? Will they even hear it? Roaul is the only one who can help Stoner bring this message. Ben Bova writes great stories with interesting chracters and themes. My only criticism is that his diagloge seems forced and artificial. I love the grand Tour series and Voyagers is a tie in.

Worldlines shift at near lightspeed!
I loved this. I didn't think I was going to at the beginning, it had been so long from the originals.
As I read further though I began to enjoy the delicate skewering of the politicos the tree huggers, the religious nuts....
Nobody does it like Bova!

More PC than SF
I vaguely remember reading the first three novels in this series. Vaguely as they were produced so many years ago.
This newest addition is a sorry attempt to extend what was, otherwise, a nice trilogy.
This novel is more political correctness gone wild than a serious sf novel. In fact I almost dropped the whole thing after reading just a few pages where it's obvious Bova is letting his far left wing ideologes (he has done so in other novels in recent years but not to this extent)take center stage. And I am far from aconservative.
Take away all the politics, mainly a world which is a nightmare projection of our real universe, where the worst of the global far right have taken control and the grossly exaggeratted fears of Al Gore and his ilk lead to a worldide collapse via "global warming/climate change" and you might have a readable story. Might that is if there weren't so many glaring mistakes in the storyline and the hero's super human, via alien technology, abilities, as well as gotcha moments.
One example being the fact the human/alien is able to travel instantaneously over vast distances, yet is admittedly not able to violate the laws of physics. Hello!? This is akin to a poorly written comic book, rather than a serious sf novel by an an experienced writer.
There is also the fact that the story moves in fits and starts. The pacing just gets going at a smooth level when it suddenly changes speed and finally is so rushed as to essentialy violate the aforementioned laws of physics.
It is obvious that Bova is letting his personal issues cloud his writing and those having taken a quantum leap past his former pc laden series this will probably be the last title I ever bother to pick up by him. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (17)

Another Fine Story by Ben Bova
Award-winning sci-fi author Ben Bova has once again written an exciting, action-packed story set in the near future.

Dan Randolph and his company, Astro manufacturing, have developed a power satellite capable of harnessing the energy from the sun and beaming the energy to earth.This energy will allow the United States to become independent of foreign oil.However, Dan has suffered a major setback, as his experimental space plane, which is to be used to ferry technicians to and from the powersat, has broken up on re-entry.The pilot, Hannah Aarons, was also killed.To make matters worse, Dan's company is on the verge of financial collapse.In the interest of saving is company, Dan has enlisted the advice and assistance from several others, including Yamagata Corp. and Tricontinental Oil.Also, Morgan Scanwell, a Senator from Texas, is making a run for the presidency, and Dan pitches his powersat idea to him.Morgan agrees to make energy independence a priority of his campaign.Morgan's advisor is Jane Thornton, a former girlfriend of Dan's.But is the affair really over between them?

Asim al-Bashir is a middle-eastern businessman seated on the board of Tricontinental.Tricontinental agrees to loan Dan $1.5 billion to remain afloat, and al-Bashir is soon sent to monitor Astro's dealings.But is al-Bashir all he seems to be, or is there more to him?

Upon viewing the wreckage of the space plane, Dan becomes convinced that the crash was a result of terrorists.But, how to prove it?Meanwhile, two of Dan's employees turn up dead; one the result of an explosion, the other from an apparent suicide.From here, Dan enlists the help of the FBI, explaining the deaths of his employees and his suspicions about the space plane.Meanwhile, Dan has agreed to back Scanwell for president.As it turns out, Scanwell is secretly married to Jane Thornton, but that hasn't kept Dan and Jane from re-kindling their romance.al-Bashir has kept in touch with his middle-east contacts and soon, a mission is planned to disable the powersat so, that instead of beaming energy, instead it will become a giant laser used for killing thousands of Americans, including the President.Will the terrorists succeed, or will Dan be able to stop them before it's too late?

This book is actually a prequel to Bova's Asteroid Wars series and does a good job of giving the reader a background of Dan Randolph.

I enjoyed this book very much.Bova has once again done a good job of developing the story and characters.The story itself is full of action and suspense, right up to the final chapter. I've read many of Ben Bova's books, and I would rate "Powersat" as one of the best I've read.Readers of science fiction will not want to miss this fine book.

Am I the first person to read this on a Kindle?
Ben Bova always spins a very enjoyable yarn.This one stretched things just a bit though.Another "double-damn" and my head would have exploded.

Another MAJOR problem with this book is the way it was laid out on my new #359 Kindle I just purchased from Amazon.Many times the 2-5 paragraph for a new chapter would come out of the blue and be at the end of the previous chapter. Then you "flip the page" and read the first paragraph, "Ohhhh, that's how it goes."Then you start reading the second paragraph and it picks up where it is supposed to.

Enjoyable thriller
Ben Bova at his typical good. This is another Dan Randolph thriller, written in 2005 to do some of the back story in the Grand Tour (Dan Randolph is the main character in Privateers and Empire Builders and appears in the first books the Asteroid Wars tetralogy). It also sets the stage for his off-and-on relationship with Jane Thornton Scanwell. It kept me reading, but the characters are shades of gray (better than solely black and white) but definitely not technicolor. An enjoyable confection, but not a meal.

An excellent technothriller
I enjoyed this booke immensely.I thought that it was well researched and thought out.And, it applies to our modern times very well.All in all this book is a keeper.

Sci-Fi Mystery
This is not a hardcore Sci-Fi novel as some may have been expecting. Instead it takes the reader on a murder mystery journey with the added suspense of the Powersat and its fate. I enjoyed this book as it kept me coming back for more. It's somewhat like a soap opera as it is very suspenseful and contains a mystery plot with some surprising twists. And of course, it provides a dash of hope for us cornucopia minded people. Fun Read...thanks Ben Bova! ... Read more

Product Description
The story of light affects us every day of our lives...

In highly visual, entertaining and easy-to-understand language, famed science writer Ben Bova explains the many ways light affects our minds, bodies and universe.
--Why do people kiss with their eyes closed?
--What exactly is quantum physics?
--Why is it difficult to swat a mosquito?
--Is the universe expanding or contracting?
--How do lasers work?
--What do we "see" when we dream?

In this all-encompassing work, one of the most noted science fiction as well as nonfiction writers of our time explores the subject of light and shows how it has shaped every aspect of our existence.

From the creation of life to the exploration of the heavens and the stars, from the origins of the earth to the possibility of life on distant planets, Ben Bova unveils the beauty and science behind this phenomenon. Dr. Bova masterfully explains how light affects us every day of our lives, from our religions to our sex drives, as well as how we use light in art, science, industry, entertainment, cosmetics, jewelry and much more.

"The enlightenment of discoveries and the brilliance of Ben Bova combine to enable our minds to glimpse the majesty of the infinite worlds of light in the universe."
--Buzz Aldrin

"Superbly written--a banquet of topics served by a master literary chef!"
--Bill Pogue, Skylab astronaut

"The Story of Light is a light-hearted, enlightened romp through many facets of human experience, reflected and refracted through Bova's bright, polychromatic mind."
--David Grinspoon, Principal Scientist, Southwest Research Institute and author of Venus Revealed
... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

Excellent read
What I liked most was its easy reading style.Sure, it could have been more comprehensive, technical and detailed, but it was a refreshing and moving reading experience.I like Mr Bova's science fiction but I think he only presents solid credentials for the basis of his fiction with this type of book.The real target for this book would be young people to encourage themselves to look at science and be inspired.Ben said it was "conversational" and it certainly was with my eyes rolling over the words and phrases with great ease.

Somwhat interesting, repetitive, uninspiring
I had great hopes for this book when I discovered it in the store.I had been mildly entertained by a few of Bova's Scifi works and was expecting something...different.I have several complaints, first and foremost being structure. The book is filled with endless repetition as he introduces a theme then covers the same thing a few pages later.The author takes on too much - we hear about war, "destruction" of our planet, unrelated historical stories of scientists, the philosophy of science, book burning...

What I am trying to say is that compared to a Dennis Overbye, Bova is a horrible science writer.The prose has less poetry than a book review and seems abbreviated at all times, quick snippets of data with "info boxes" and then we are off to a new subject.This is not to say that one cannot learn new things.The SCIENCE was interesting, the varieties of light wondrous in their divergent but underlying unity, the history of some of the discoverers and discoveries were enjoyable, but...there is more to a book than one element.

He (mis)treats the reader as if they were first grade students, explaining the most mundane points as if addressing morons. The many attempts at humor fall flat and the organization would delight a maze designer.What's missing is a good editor who would have pared this book about 100 pages. I would like to see this material in the hands of a good science writer.

Entertaining, fact-filled, and far-ranging account
Bova is a master at writing readable prose for a general readership. He's been at it for fifty years or more, and is among the best at making science fascinating. One is reminded of the work of the late, great, and sorely missed Isaac Asimov. Like Asimov, Bova is the author of over a hundred books, both fiction and nonfiction, and is especially celebrated for his innovative science fiction. I have only one small criticism. In his touting of the Strategic Defense Initiative from the Reagan administration and how lasers can be used to knock down ballistic missiles, he fails to mention how easily they can be fooled by dummy targets while failing to point out how ineffectual lasers are against "suitcase" nuclear bombs. To his credit Bova admits his bias on page 282, a bias that came about because he was employed as a marketing manager for the Avco Everett Research Laboratory in Massachusetts, a company that was in the business of making high-powered lasers.

The chapters on the development of photography from the pinhole camera obscura to lasers, holography and fiber optics are among the most interesting. The fourth part of the book, "Book IV: To Seek," beginning on page 323 is a readable, concise update on how electromagnetic radiation is helping us to explore the universe. In other words, Bova gets to talk about subjects he loves dearly, cosmology, physics and astronomy. This is not a work for scientists; instead there is a clear emphasis on satisfying the needs of the general reader by providing a wealth of information about light and just about anything to do with light, including painting, perception, how the eye works, photography, photosynthesis--indeed, even the origin of life--the search for extraterrestrial life, extrasolar planets, radiation, LASIK surgery, relativity, quantum mechanics, gemstones and their uses, time travel, the ozone layer, nuclear fission and fusion...etc. His enthusiasm for solar power and especially for Solar-Powered Satellites, "huge satellites that can generate gigawatts of solar electricity and send it to Earth through microwave beams" (p. 310) is infectious and welcome.

There is a modest bibliography and a short glossary and an index. One is occasionally amused at Bova's asides and quaint cultural references (e.g., Jimmy Durante!). He keeps a light-hearted tone and mixes in bits of toastmaster humor. I'm thinking of the "Hungarian recipe" for an omelette: "First, steal some eggs..." (p. 291) or his description of the active element fluorine in contrast to the relatively inert xenon, as "a used-car salesman who is running for mayor." (p. 271)

The Story of Light can be profitably read by teenagers as well as by lay persons looking to keep up with recent developments set in a clear historical context.

Ahh, I see the light
A very entertaining look at light and its related functions, including lasers, telescopes and other hardware. Easy read without too much technical jargon, in the same vein as Asimov'solder science essays. A page turner!

The Story of Light
I admit to prejudice.
I have known Bova for some time and share his views on many things, still I found this to be one of the best text/references I have ever seen.

It is certainly worth a look for any Parent unhappy with some of the lowest common denominator school dreck and seeking answers to questions like 'why do the stars shine' and 'why is the sky blue' add to that answers FAR beyond why we sometimes feel sad on a rainy day and you have a wonder of information at hand to answer questions for both the small people and yourself. Comprehensible all the way through.

Highly recommended. ... Read more

Product Description
Twenty-five astronauts of the international Mars mission set down on the harsh and unforgiving planet and soon face deadly meteor showers, subzero temperatures, and a mysterious virus. Reprint. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (84)

Marf
I was generally into this book, and was willing to overlook the tedious stereotypes and dated technology (at one point the astronaut runs out of video tape), but then Mr. Bova lost me with the most basic science. *Spoiler* When all of the Mars crew gets sick from scurvy and the protagonist Jamie is barely able to move and his gums are bleeding, he mixes himself some Tang, which has always been loaded with vitamin C. At this point I nearly burned the book. They had even made themselves juice from concentrate while stranded in the rover and their "scurvy" was worsening. In addition, Bova kept pointing out how they were eating frozen prepared meals that are quite unlike the hardtack that prompted outbreaks of scurvy in sailors of the nineteenth century because the fresh food was gone. Give me a break. He used this scurvy theme to be the big crisis of the book and it is a stupid premise. I went along when I thought their malady was a Martian virus, which was at least plausible.This book pales in comparison to the Red Mars series which never insulted my intelligence like Bova's Mars did.

The drama of science and politics
A multi-national team travels to Mars on a voyage of exploration, encountering both the physical perils of interplanetary travel and the purely man-made dangers of international politics.

Ben Bova eschews such conventions as alien races and faster-than-light travel to produce a serious consideration of what the first journey to Mars might be like.He has faith in the inherent drama of space exploration.Since no one nation possesses sufficient resources to mount the mission alone, the crew has been assembled with political considerations weighed as carefully as technical competence.The central character is American geologist Jamie Waterman, of Native American descent, whose unthinking expression of awe when first stepping onto the surface of Mars provokes a firestorm of political controversy back home and combines with his unflinching drive to investigate evidence of a possible Martian civilization to fundamentally reshape the mission.Some of the characters fit the role of villain a bit too neatly, but otherwise this is an excellent, thought-provoking journey, if not quite in the same league as Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy.

Red Mars takes on a new meaning
Many of the Native Americans share the belief that "The People" came from a hole in the ground. This book explores that theory and with all of its subtle overtones. It was my first work from Ben Bova but not my last I hope to read.

Buy it. Read it. Love it.

Good book but lacks action.
I would give this book 3.5 stars if I could.It's got the standard Ben Bova elements such as:
1.Interesting characters
2.Multiple points of view, and multiple stories overlapping
3.Politics, I mean real political machinery at work.
4.Good pacing.He makes standard, mundane human activities very interesting and readable.
5.Real good hard science.

The only problem that I find is that the story has not exciting climax, to me.Once it's a forgone conclusion that they will find the remnants of life on Mars, the last 1/4 becomes a bit anticlimatic.I find that I need a little more space opera-type action for me to give the book 4 or 5 stars.

The Rovers have changed our view of Mars, but ....
With the Martian rovers Spirit and Opportunity driving around Mars and sending us back some thousands of pictures you have to ask yourself if a book on the first manned trip to mars makes sense. Strangely enough, even though this book is now 17 years old, the answer is yes.

To be sure there are some problems with the book that has made it outdated. In the book, for instance the Soviet Union is still around and part of earthly politics. And in the book Mars is a much nicer place than we see now.

But all in all, I didn't find that these things mattered. After all, we still haven't sent any people to Mars. And the politics of a multi-national crew composed of both men and women is still an open question. So far as we know, there hasn't been any sex in space. In the book there is, and the crew has taken their Earth bound attitudes with them. This includes all the petty problems you would expect of having people cooped up together for a long time.

These are just a couple of the interesting points about the book. Forget the forbidding, desolate pictures from Spirit and Opportunity and have a good time with this book.

This is the first book in the Mars series recorded by Stefan Rudnicki. (See also Return to Mars and Mars Life) It is complete and unabridged, almost 20 hours of recording on 15 compact disks. He's a great reader. ... Read more

Product Description

Customer Reviews (13)

Worst book I've ever read
I've read a lot of books and this is quite possibly the worst book I've ever read.It started off great and was a complete dud. FAIL!

did he not have an editor ?
All the cash-in quick movie script elements are there, but hopelessly flawed by: cartoonish characters described in one phrase or less, racist worldview, fear hyped for benefit of defense industry beltway bandits currently fleecing the taxpayer... An editor who cared about the project would have forced rewrites to make this less obviously a targeted hasbara-style propaganda piece. The magical nuke takes out all or nearly all 24+ GPS satellites, at 20,000 km, at the same time as Geostationary satellites at 36,000 km, most screened from direct EMP by Earth, and the next thing you know, people have forgotten how to navigate cars and trucks, and wolves are gnawing on our shinbones in the wilderness.

Ben Has Fallen off a Cliff
I've been reading Mr. Bova for close to 4 decades.
Mostly enjoyed all his offerings.
This offering is just terrible, characters are not just paper mache, but 2 dimensional cardboard cut outs.
Plot line is totally unbelievable &, since he finished in 7/09, would he have us believe the One would react as his President does?
The whole story would end w/2 HE Tomahawk missiles, submarine launched or an F-22 dropping a paveway on the launch site!Hardly a WWIII precurser!
Too bad Amazon won't give me $$ back for a crappy book!

Mediocre techno-thriller with an axe to grind
I've read this book before.It's called "Flight of the Old Dog", by Dale Brown.Large experimental military aircraft with new technology is sent into combat before it's ready and wipes out the opposition.Brown does it better; he was USAF aircrew, and knows what he's talking about. Bova doesn't.

At least it was short
"Able One" is a formulaic near-future, near-disaster novel by a good author who slacked-off. The novel read like the script for a cheesy disaster movie such as "The Towering Inferno" or "The Poseidon Adventure." We learn a little about the upcoming disaster. We learn a bit about a female Air Force pilot, a laser engineer, the owner of a defense contract firm, the Secretary of State, a weather man, a Lebanese-American National Intelligence Committee analyst, an electric line repairman in the northern midwest, a family on a driving vacation, an Air Force general, the President, his Chief of Staff, etc. The weather man, the line repairman, and the family on vacation were completely peripheral to the plot and apparently were added to provide a touch of "little person" drama. The book's dialogs could have come from a mediocre comic book. The North Korean enemies always were referred to as "gooks" by people who were too young to have fought in Korea or Vietnam.

The President was concerned more about his image than handling multiple crises: every communication, weather, and navigation satellite had just been destroyed by the North Koreans; major storms are knocking-out power throughout the upper midwest; banks, the stock exchange, and credit card companies cannot transact business; and the North Koreans have two more nuclear missiles ready to launch with Honolulu or San Francisco as probable targets. The President is relying on an untested laser weapon to destroy the missles, and instead of handling the crises from the White House he flies to San Francisco to give a speech to the nation (that only the local attendees can hear because the TV satellite feeds are down). He refuses to give fighter protection to the 747 with the laser weapon, because he's worried that the fighter jocks might precipitate a war with the North Koreans (who already destroyed billions of dollars worth of satellites and are launching two more nuclear missiles).

Unlike most of Bova's other novels, there were no strong protagonists. The female Air Force pilot had been banished to Alaska for sleeping with the Air Force General. The laser engineer was a wuss who destroyed his family life and buried himself in his work. The Lebanese-American NIC guy was the only one who saw the big picture, but he was young and too far down the totem pole to be effective. The Secretary of State was a foolish female political appointee who was duped by the brother-in-law of the Chinese premier. The defense contractor was more concerned about money than about the safety of his engineers and techs. Etcetera.

The plot was predictable (except for the incredible stupidity of the President), and the tension was low. (I was rooting for a missle to nuke San Francisco and the President.) The reviewers who said the book was "exciting" or "thrilling" must be the types of people who actually get frightened during haunted house rides at amusement parks.

If you're interested in better fiction from Ben Bova, go back to his books from the 1990s such as "Empire Builders," "Moonrise," and "Moonwar." ... Read more

Product Description
2095. After long months of travel, the gigantic colony ship Goddard has at last made orbit around Saturn, carrying a population of more than ten thousand dissidents and visionaries seeking a new life. Among Goddard+s missions is the study of Saturn+s moon Titan, which offers the possibility that life may exist amid its windswept islands and chill black seas.When the exploration vessel Titan Alpha mysteriously fails after reaching the moon+s surface, long-buried tensions surface among the colonists. Eduoard Urbain, the mission+s chief scientist, is wracked with despair as he sees his life+s work unravel. Malcolm Eberly, Goddard+s chief administrator, takes ruthless measures to hold onto power as a rash of suspicious incidents undermine him. Holly Lane, the colony+s HR director, must confront the station+s leaders to protect the lives of its people. And retired astronaut Manuel Gaeta is forced to risk his life in a last, desperate attempt to salvage the lost probe.With Titan, Ben Bova takes readers to one of the most intriguing destinations in near space: the extraordinary moon of Saturn which made international headlines last year when the Huygens probe sent back remarkable images of its strange landscapes. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (16)

Another Exciting Trip Through the Solar System
Ben Bova has written another exciting story that is loaded with action and adventure.This time, he takes the reader to Titan, the largest of Saturn's moons.

After months of travel, the colony ship Goddard is finally in orbit around Saturn.This habitat is loaded with 10,000 dissidents, rebels, scientists, and visionaries who were exiled from Earth for one reason or another.Aboard the ship is Eduoard Urbain, a scientist.More importantly, Urbain is in control of Titan Alpha, a probe which has been placed on the surface of Titan to gather data.However, once on the surface, the probe stops transmitting data to Goddard.Although data is being collected, the probe has stopped transmitting.It is as good as dead.Now, Urbain faces the dilemma of fixing the unresponsive probe.

Meanwhile, Malcolm Eberly, the habitat's chief administrator, is facing re-election.He has been in power for only a year, but he now faces a stiff challenge for re-election from Holly Lane, Eberly's former head of human resources.The main point of contention is the habitat's policy of zero growth.Eberly maintains that, unless the rings of Saturn are mined for their water molecules, the habitat has no room for expansion.Holly, on the other hand, disputes this point, saying that the habitat has room for many more people (namely, children).She begins a petition drive to have the ZPG amendment removed.From the start of the election, it appears that Eberly will win easily.He even promises to remove the ZPG amendment once the mining of the rings begins.However, scientists have discovered what they think are living organisms in the rings.If this is true, the rings cannot be mined for their water.Eberly is determined to mine the rings regardless, but Holly comes up with another plan which really shakes up the election.

Back on Titan, the scientists are having little luck re-starting Titan Alpha.The only way to get the probe moving again is for someone to go to the surface and fix it manually.Manny Gaeta, a former stuntman, has volunteered to fix Titan Alpha.He also ventured into Saturn's rings to discover the bugs (later found to be nanomachines placed by some alien civilization).Once on the surface of Titan, Manny gets more than he bargained for from the probe.It appears that, while on the surface, the probe has begun learning on its own, and the probe is convinced that any contact from humans will result in contamination.Now, Manny has the task of trying to fix the probe, while the probe sees Manny as a threat and, to make things worse, the probe has its laser pointed directly at Manny.

This is an exciting book to read.Ben Bova writes with a very readable style that draws the reader immediately in to the story.His knowledge of science is apparent, and he always devotes a chapter in his books to actual scientific information about the item he is writing about.

I recommend this book very highly.The story is excellent and the characters are well-developed, and the reader can instantly identify with them.Read this exciting installment in Bova's grand tour of the solar system; Bova fans won't be disappointed.

A bit of a rip-off of "2001"??
I enjoyed reading this novel -- good, light, summer kind of reading with a sci fi bent that is satisfying.

But weren't some of the plot lines just a bit too reminiscent of "2001: A Space Odyssey"?To wit:

(1) A computer malfunctions because of conflicting programming, which is mysterious and deeply frustrating to its creators and eventually leads the machine to attempt to kill humans (in 2001, HAL succeeded, whereas Titan Alpha does not).
(2) A mysterious race of extraterrestials has placed artifacts in the solar system that may be sending off a massive "we've been found, there's intelligent life here" signals (the obelisk and Jupiter in 2001; the nanomachines and Saturn's rings and the electromagnetic every-16-days pulse in the Bova series).

Because these are such core elements of the plotline, the result is that there's just a bit too much of a "been there, read that" feeling with "Titan."A fun read, but not much more.

Fine Addition to Bova's Grand Tour Novels
It's funny how passionate readers can be. For some who didn't like this novel, you'd get the impression that the author has committed some sort of crime against humanity. Truth be told, TITAN is a fine adventure story and it kept me interested all the way through. It's true that TITAN is a sort of sequel to SATURN, but where SATURN bogs down in several subplots relating to the new theology that haunts the background to the Grand Tour novels, TITAN does not. This is one of Bova's strengths. When he is dealing with people working in space, he succeeds remarkably. He is less adroit in dealing with religion and its social causes and effects. This isn't a crime (though it's clear that some reviewers think it is). Religion isn't handled all that well in science fiction, but when it is(as in Blish's A CASE OF CONCIENCE, Miller's A CANTICLE FOR LIEBOWITZ and Del Rey's ELEVENTH COMMANDMENT) it's handled extraordinarily well. I found it hard to believe than any human in space (in the Grand Tour Novels) would let themselves be influenced or commanded in any way by a religious group on the earth. (I understand the fear of nano-technology by the people on the earth in these novels. Bova renders that real and palpable.) I just don't see humankind becoming more obedient to religious groups; I see just the opposite. But that's just me. This is SATURN's only failure. I couldn't believe that the religious zealots on the orbiting colony ship around Saturn could hold sway in a cultural climate where people are heading off to the planets.

Still, TITAN is an excellent book and I recommend it. (And you needn't, really, to have read SATURN). Bova is one of the most dependable authors in the science fiction field, a field that's slowly being taken over by the alternate-history novel (a form of fantasy, though no one wants to admit it) and the multi-novel saga which is designed only to make money.

The OTHER thing that recommends Bova's Grand Tour are the covers which are done by John Harris. He's one of the very best science fiction cover illustrators and a genuine artist. For no other reason than getting the Harris covers, I'd recommend Bova's books to you.

Once again . . .
. . . Ben Bova is veering all over the map in the quality of novels currently being produced (from a high in "Mars" to an embarassingly pathetic low in "Venus".)

This effort, "Titan", is a direct sequal to the misnamed "Saturn" and it features (as one might expect) the giant moon of Saturn by the same name.

Ben Bova may be a decent Sci-Fi writer (and even, possibly, a competent scientist) but a social scientist he ain't -- and this novel, only marginally better than its prequal -- certainly demonstrates this.

As in "Saturn", the science takes a back seat to the socio-political machinations on board the giant habitat heading for the Ringed Planet.Most of the characters are flat and many are unsympathetic at best.The interpersonal relationship issues are utterly predictable and the social dynamics are typical to what one sees in an oversexed high school.

Nevertheless, the book does end on a bit of a cliffhanger, leaving room (of course) for more books in the series.

As an aside, Bova has, in the past, occasionally ("Mars", "Jupiter") introduced believable and sympathetic religious characters.Not in "Titan", though.Like "Saturn" before it, Bova seems to regard every person of faith as some sort of ultrafundamentalist zealot wacko.This does get tiring.

titan
Not up to the usual standards, keep up with the science fiction and keep politics out of space, one idiot in america is enough , we don't need the same sort of arrogant , cleptimaniac portraying (Bush) in space. ... Read more

Product Description
Second in size only to Jupiter, bigger than a thousand Earths but light enough to float in water, home of crushing gravity and delicate, seemingly impossible rings, it dazzles and attracts us:

SATURN

Earth groans under the thumb of fundamentalist political regimes. Crisis after crisis has given authoritarians the upper hand. Freedom and opportunity exist in space, for those with the nerve and skill to run the risks.

Now the governments of Earth are encouraging many of their most incorrigible dissidents to join a great ark on a one-way expedition, twice Jupiter's distance from the Sun, to Saturn, the ringed planet that baffled Galileo and has fascinated astronomers ever since.

But humans will be human, on Earth or in the heavens-so amidst the idealism permeating Space Habitat Goddard are many individuals with long-term schemes, each awaiting the tight moment. And hidden from them is the greatest secret of all, the real purpose of this expedition, known to only a few....
... Read more

Customer Reviews (39)

Saturn
I really admire Bova's vision of the human race's advancement to a Type II civilization.Broadly envisioned and full of hope for the future.

A good yarn for the uninitiated
I haven't read other Bova, picked this up at a used-book store. Cracking yarn, read it in 24 hours. The characters were well-developed compared to much earlier SF (Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama, for example). The plot was more about anthropology than hard SF but very good and full of unexpected events, and my loyalties swung back and forth among the nuanced characters.

It struck me that many plotlines of Battlestar Galactica (2003 TV series) could not have been written without this book. It meanwhile borrows heavily from Rama when it comes to the habitat itself.

The book was over too soon, and it's all about getting there; the story of mankind's experience with the ringed is not told! That's my only criticism; the book should be called Habitat, or Journey, but not Saturn. Three solid stars.

not Bova's best
I really enjoyed Mars, as well as other books by Ben Bova. Unfortunately, Saturn is no Mars - despite its name it's not even in the same solar system.

Saturn is bogged down by way too many characters. Secondary - rather tertiary - characters abound, showing up once or perhaps twice in the 400 pages. It also suffers from a lack of a clear protagonist. Eberly is the primary person, but he is certainly not someone the reader sympathises with. His fellow conspirators are worse - cardboard stereotypes. Holly is an interesting young/old woman (ambiguous age due to cryogenics) but her emotions yo-yo from one male to another, and it is hard to care in the end who she ends up with.

Potentially climatic scenes such as the posse call are left flat, as the persuasion that Eberly so effortlessly used for hundreds and thousands of people inexplicably leaves him in a room of fifty.

Very disappointing. I would suggest reading Mars a second time and pretending it has rings rather than reading Saturn.

Weakest Entry of the Grand Tour Series
After "Jupiter," which was good, "Saturn" was very disappointing. The title should actually have been "Journey to Saturn" since precious little time is actually spent AT the ringed planet. I'm sure this is because Bova had "Titan" in the hopper and wanted to get a two-fer on Saturn. It's too bad that the author didn't deliver on the title. I wanted Saturn, not this soap opera about a group of malcontents traveling to Saturn. This can only be called science fiction because it takes place in the future and on a space ship. In reality, it is a middling melodrama with Bova's standard-issue corrupt, right-wing Earth government.

Read this book if you want to continue to follow the the grand tour series (which is getting long on the tooth but I am hooked...what can I say). Otherwise, avoid it.

The Solar System Adventures Continue
Ben Bova's planetary series continues with "Saturn", a novel about the ringed planet and the humans who explore it.

The space habitat Goddard, loaded with 10,000 intellectuals and scientists, is headed for the great ringed planet.The inhabitants are a motley collection of volunteers, ones who have been asked, and ones who have been forced, to leave Earth and begin the voyage to Saturn. They don't agree with the regimes which have taken over Earth's governments.The plan is to see if a self-governing, self-sustaining habitat can be set up far out in the end reaches of the solar system.

Among the group is Malcolm Eberly.He has been recruited by the Holy Disciples from a Vienna prison with instructions to see that the population chooses a path of righteousness.Eberly agrees and is confident he can impose his own rule upon the others.However, the Holy Disciples have also placed spies, namely Ruth Morgenthau and Sammi Vyborg.Each has their own desire for power, and they are determined to get it.

Also aboard is Holly Lane.Holly is an assistant of Malcolm's who has developed very strong personal feelings for him.However, these feelings will end up getting Holly in very deep trouble as the story progresses.Other characters include stuntman Manny Gaeta, who has been assigned by Holly's sister to keep an eye on her; James Wilmont, the current director of the habitat, who holds some dark secrets of his own; Kris Cardenas, a scientist specializing in nanotechnology; Eduord Urbain, the leader of the scientists who has developed a probe to explore Saturn's largest moon, Titan; and Nadia Wunderly, another scientist who has discovered the possibility of life existing in Saturn's rings.All of the interactions of these characters make Bova's story of Saturn highly readable.

Although I'd rate this book slightly below the others I've read in the planetary series, it still has plenty of action to keep the reader interested.I feel that Bova does a pretty good job of developing the characters, especially Eberly and Holly.The story itself is enjoyable to read, although some of Bova's trademark science flair is missing from the book.Despite this, I still enjoyed reading this book very much.

I've become a big fan of this series of books, and I plan on reading more in the future.I recommend this book and this series to fans of science fiction.You won't be disappointed in any of these great sci fi novels. ... Read more

Product Description

Customer Reviews (9)

Contemporary Sci-Fi With Classic Themes
"Titan," winner of the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Sci-Fi Novel in 2007, is classic science fiction.Set in an artificial habitat orbiting Saturn, the book's themes explore future technologies such as cryonics and nanotech; speculates on the long-term impacts of current "fundamentalist" movements here on Earth; considers the ramifications resulting from the discovery of life (and more) on distant worlds; and re-visits the ethos of the robot.But what really makes "Titan" a work of classic science fiction isn't all the gee-whiz technology and theory, but the more basic exploration of how these developments affect Human nature and culture, with a strong suggestion that, although times and places march on, people remain pretty much the same.Even in a place like the "Goddard Habitat" we will still have our scheming politicians, ruthless scientists, cunning women, romantic entanglements, babbling newsmen, dedicated engineers, intrepid heroes, and plenty of others to keep things interesting.The book does start slow, and you'll have to will yourself to get through the first hundred or so pages.(I think that's what critics call "plodding.")But it begins rolling downhill from there, until an avalanche ending makes you glad you stuck with it.(Had the pace been a bit more brisk at the outset, I'd have given this book 5 stars.)This was the first of Bova's "Grand Tour" novels I've read, and it did make me want to read more of that series, and more Bova in general. Hope you enjoy it.

Imagine what it will be like to actually live in space
Ben Bova rocks! I have been reading Ben Bova for about the past 10 or 12 years. His stories are spell-binding, and I think it gives a realistic view of what it will be like in about 100 years, living and working in space.Some science fiction writers predict a 'singularity' in the next 50 years where artificial intelligence will surpass ours and Ben takes a more moderate view with incremental increases in scientific knowledge and technical development.I have seen criticism for his character developments, and I suppose I am a bit of a nerd so I do not see his characters as cartoonish.One has to keep in mind that his novels are entertainment mixed with future speculation, so in any case we can't expect people to think as we do today. I have no doubt that the coming developments in technology will impact culture and the way people interact etc.Titan is one of Ben's best works.What I particularly liked about it is how he describes the surface of Titan, and the chapters that involves the rover and how it 'thinks' its way through challenges.Another novel that I really want to recommend for similar reasons, is 'Jupiter'.

Titanically Boring
I just could not finish this book. The writing in "Titan" is bland, boring, and at times grating. Yes, the plot moves along, but I found myself not caring what came next because there was no life to the writing.
It also had a dated feel to it - I did not believe I was reading about a story taking place in the year 2095. It felt like 1955. Characters use words like 'kiddo' and 'betcha' all the time.
Lots of time spent on the politics of the Goddard Habitat, and you are bombarded with a bewildering array of minor characters very quickly. What little science there is in the first 100 pages is... well, non-descript and commonplace. It's more exciting reading a NASA press release.

Modern science fiction the way it OUGHT to be!
In Earth's past, Australia was effectively a prison colony, a place for transportation of convicted felons to get them out of sight and out of mind, a place where misfits, recluses and hard-nosed independents could live or die on the strength of their own efforts, a place to which people with intractable problems could run away and start over. In Earth's future, Ben Bova has imagined a distant space habitat orbiting above the surface of Saturn's icy moon, Titan, which has much the same demographic - a ragtag motley crew of misfits and dissidents, sick and tired of a ham-fisted dictatorial theocratic government on earth, willing to pull up stakes and courageously start over in a bleak environment where the future is a blank slate waiting to be written.

Long-time fans of Bova's "Grand Tour of the Universe" series may remember the weakness in "Mercury", a rock-em, sock-em screenplay that was little more than a soap opera force fit into the environment of Mercury that gave scant attention to the science part of science fiction. "Titan" is the polar opposite, thankfully returning the theme of a tour of the solar system to center stage.

The complex, almost insurmountable engineering difficulties of managing a space-faring habitat such as the Goddard - shielding, food, insulation, waste and communication - are all examined in detail. The extreme hazards of navigation through Saturn's rings and landing on the surface of Titan are described with breathtaking foresight. Both the hardware and the software involved in a robotic surface rover, the Titan Alpha, are described with painstaking attention to the minutiae of problems that such a vehicle would be likely to encounter in its scientific explorations and data gathering mission.

But Bova hasn't neglected to examine the softer philosophical people issues of such an environment either. Just as with any revolutionary group that breaks away from their beginnings, the inhabitants of space habitat Goddard deal with issues of governance, democracy and the creation of a new constitution that is appropriate to their needs and their unique circumstances. Of course, they must perforce continue to deal as best they can with a continuing relationship with their progenitors, the governments that remain behind on the earth and the moon. On a more micro-level, "Titan" deals realistically with the day to day squabbles that would inevitably arise between differing groups in the habitat - men vs women, scientists vs engineers, governments vs citizens, the doers vs the grunts that are along for the ride, and so on.

One of the most interesting soft people issues that Bova injected into the story was the controversy surround a policy of "zero population growth". Clearly, Goddard's ability to handle a population has a distinct maximum determined by limited resources such as space, food, oxygen, waste turnover and so on. The conflict between the necessity for a ZPG policy and the natural drives of humans to procreate makes for some interesting philosophical discussion and debate.

Last but not least, there is that positively brilliant ending (Is it possible to smile and be slack-jawed with amazement at the same time?) Anyone who reads and enjoys both science and science fiction knows that the reality of the universe is far more complex and bizarre than any mere science fiction writer could possibly create. But Bova has done his best to hypothesize a future for mankind beyond imagining when a discovery is made in Saturn's rings that dwarfs the speculations of the best scientists that Goddard has to offer.

Truly, "Titan" is modern science fiction written the way the science fiction should be - hard, soft, exciting, cutting edge and thought provoking. Well done, Ben Bova.

Paul Weiss

If you have read one of the Grand Tour you know what you are getting.
To be honest I don't remember this book specifically that well.It is on par with his other Grand Tour books.Personally I read these during my vacation time and tend to finish them after a few days.To me they are a bit like action movies, pretty mindless fun for a couple hours.Honestly pick one up from the library see if you like it.I am not sure if I would buy any of them for my shelf though...maybe if they all came in a nice box set for not too much. ... Read more

Product Description

There is a dream called Moonbase, nurtured by ex-astronaut Paul Stavenger and his wife, Joanna Masterson Stavenger, head of the powerful Masterson Corporation.

There is a future of astonishing possibilities and vital technological development waiting on a lifeless world of astonishing contrasts, where sub-frigid darkness abuts the blood-boiling light -- a future threatened by greed and jealousy, insanity and murder.

The Moon and its mysteries have captivated the Stavenger family, and it will continue to exert its pull upon subsequent generations. For all those who experience its magnificent desolation are haunted by it eternally. Some will be doomed by its pitiless aversion to human life.

And some can never leave.

Customer Reviews (27)

It's fun
I think I have read almost every book by Bova.It is all pretty similar.If you like this kind of writing then you will probably like this book.He doesn't stray far from his formula.It is a pretty light and fast read.It is like going to see an action movie.You don't expect much depth, just to be mildly entertained for a while.The characters are not that memorable but while reading the book you do get drawn into their dramas.The plot is passable, sometimes a bit outlandish, but you accept it because you weren't expecting more.If you are looking for a light read to entertain away some time, sure, pick up a couple of Bova's books.

Not a masterpiece, but well above your average scifi
The only issue I have with this book is its use of nanotech as a magic wand to solve a lot of the problems in the plot, but the book is interesting enough that I can suspend my belief and enjoy it. The part about life on moonbase is very well written, and I think it's the best part of the book.

Good, But Not Bova's Best
Controlled by Masterson Corporation, Moonbase has been set up as an advance research facility crewed by researchers and scientists.However, Paul Stavenger has greater dreams for Moonbase; he sees it as becoming its own self-sufficient community in space, totally non-dependent on anything from Earth.But, beneath this lofty goal, trouble has been brewing.Paul has been having an affair with Joanna Masterson, who happens to be the wife of Greg Masterson II, the head of Masterson Corporation.To make matters worse, Greg II is found dead, the victim of an apparent suicide; or is it?Now, it appeared that Joanna's son, Greg III, would be in prime position to take over as head of the corporation.However, Joanna manages to shock everyone on the Board of Directors by nominating Paul, her new husband, to become the new CEO.Paul is elected, and Greg III is left shocked.But. Greg III intends to shut down Moonbase, no matter who or what gets in his way.

Soon, Joanna discovers that she is pregnant with Paul's son, but much worse things are about to happen.Nanotechnology is used on the moon for a variety of reasons.Paul has gone to the moon to study the uses of nanotechnology, but Greg has gotten wind of Paul's plans.He has inserted "gobblers"; visciuos nanobugs, into the batch of nanomachines Paul is working with.These Gobblers somehow managed to work themselves into Paul's suit and destroy it.Paul and two other workers are killed by the gobblers.

Fast-forward 18 years.Doug Stavenger, now a young man, has become interested in keeping his father's dream of transforming Moonbase into its own community.Meanwhile, Greg III has spent years in therapy trying to come to terms with what he did to Paul.Joanna, now CEO of Masterson, has decided that Greg will take over as Moonbase director.But, this decision proves to be fatal as events play out over the rest of the story.Will Doug and Greg be able to co-exist, or will their simmering lack of trust threaten to boil over?

I thought this was a very good book.I thought the character development was good, especially Paul and Greg III.However, I did feel that some of the characters were more shallow than some of the others.I did enjoy the action that took place at Moonbase more than that of what occurred on Earth.I made the mistake of reading "Moonwar", the sequel to "Moonrise", first so I kind of knew beforehand how this book would end.Nevertheless, I did enjoy reading this book.

I recommend "Moonrise" very highly.Although I feel that this is not Ben Bova's best work, it is till worth reading.Highly recommended for science fiction fans.

GREAT STORIES; AVERAGE STORYTELLING
I shall write of both "Moonrise" and "Moonwar."

These are the stories of Moonbase, a permanent lunar settlement built by an American corporation in the mid-21st century.These tales chronicle the political and societal tension wrought by unpopular scientific endeavors, and the unforeseen consequences thereof.The books portray a future wherein a new fascism creeps across the entire globe, embraced by a superstitious public, and at dire odds with the free-thinking scientists living on the Moon--men and women who journeyed there to escape the shackles of Earthside ignorance and fear.You will find intrigue, betrayal, villainy, sexual bartering, rugged individualism, and even love within these books' pages.

But Ben Bova's vocabulary is disappointing.His dialog is often uninspired and even predictable.His narrative, his pacing, his exposition, his character development, and even his plot development are all very Saturday matinee.Even worse, his understanding of relationships is shallow.

But what gets these books off the ground and keeps the reader till their last pages is Ben Bova's love of space exploration.The man fervently believes that space exploration will benefit all of mankind, and not just the bureaucrats or big business.When Ben Bova describes an exclusively astronomical scene, his passion is undeniable.In the first book, there's a scene wherein an 18-year-old walks upon the lunar surface for the first time, and it borders on epiphanous.Ben Bova brings the Moon's unique beauty into sharp focus; sometimes, you can actually feel the regolith beneath your boots.It's this passion, I believe, that makes these books worth reading--in spite of their shortfalls.

A Big Disappointment
I was in a mood for some "hard" science fiction when I was in the bookstore the other day. Remembering how much I liked Ben Bova's stuff in the past, I started looking through his newer stuff and settled on "Moonrise." Moon colonies and nanotechnology! What could be better?

Unfortunately, Bova manages to suffocate every ounce of suspense and mystery from these potentially thrilling topics with stilted dialog, boring board-room politics, contrived behaviors, and repetitive narrative.

- The first third of the book switches back and forth between the moon and earth without any obvious literary purpose, and I found this to be terribly annoying and even tedious.

- You know very soon that Greg is a murderer, so nothing he does is surprising. The only shocking aspect is how everyone lets him get away with it. For example,

- Joanna is supposed to be a savvy and disciplined corporate woman who is strong enough to edge her unbalanced son Greg out of the top position at the family aerospace corporation -- but not strong enough to do anything about the seven or eight people he's admitted killing by page 150. Then she practically lets Greg babysit her younger son Doug (the "good" one). You know, the one about whom Greg said, "Abort it!" and "Get rid of that monster you're carrying in your belly!" and so on. Joanna is not a "complex" characterization, just mind-numbingly random.

- Booze and sex are sprinkled throughout awkwardly as if some editor said, "make this PG-13." All female characters are described primarilly by how attractive they are to men. The liquor "still" on the moon is referred to in the same cut-and-paste way every time.

- What I *was* looking for -- the "geek porn" of in-depth discussion of nanotechnology and the science of making a moon base -- was there in only the most stingy quantities, like chocolate syrup on a Weight Watcher's cookie.

- The whole anti-nanomachine movement is presented like the characters in the book: mono-dimensionally, with precious little explanation or discussion of their rationale. They oppose the technology because, well, they're ignorant luddites, what do you expect they would do? This isn't really thought-provoking at all, just shallow politician-bashing and religion -baiting.

Some reviewers found this book hard to put down. I found it hard to continue to the end. ... Read more

Product Description
The surface of Venus is the most hellish place in the solar system. The ground is hot enough to melt aluminum. The air pressure is so high it has crushed spacecraft landers as though they were tin cans. The sky is perpetually covered with clouds of sulfuric acid. The atmosphere is a choking mixture of carbon dioxide and poisonous gases.

This is where Van Humphries must go. Or die trying.

His older brother perished in the first attempt to land a man on Venus, years before, and his father had always hated Van for surviving when his brother died. Now his father is offering a ten billion dollar prize to the first person to land on Venus and return his oldest son's remains.

To everyone's surprise, Van takes up the offer. But what Van Humphries will find on Venus will change everything--our understanding of Venus, of global warming on Earth, and his knowledge of who he is.
Amazon.com Review
Ben Bova picked his villains well for this fast-paced, popcorn-and-Milk-Duds matinee: Topping the playbill is our sister planet, Venus itself, which Bova matter-of-factly describes as "the most hellish place in the solar system." Sci-fi authors (Bova included) have all but colonized Mars by now, but few have boldly gone to the aluminum-melting, sulfuric-acid-soaked surface of the Morning Star. Venus proves a mighty, unthinking antagonist indeed--frustrating the efforts of sickly but likable rich kid Van Humphries to land there and recover the remains of his older brother Alex, who died two years earlier on another ill-fated mission.

Van gets pushed back and forth between the book's two lesser villains--his mean old cuss of a father, Martin Humphries, who's posted the $10 billion Venus Prize to the first person to return Alex's body, and Lars Fuchs, a belligerent asteroid miner and Martin's arch-nemesis, who's also decided to make a go at the purse.

Characterizations ride coach on this high-adventure flight, but remember that we're talking about Ben Bova here. It's hard to dispute the master's choices as you're following Van's well-researched, thrills-and-chills descent through Venus's pressure-cooker atmosphere. With solid science, a palatable environmental message (how could you resist commenting on greenhouse gases in a book like this?), and an inspiring character arc for unlikely hero Van, Venus delivers guilt-free, man-against-nature SF in a tight, page-turning package. --Paul Hughes ... Read more

Customer Reviews (59)

Gripping, but Bad
From a purely entertainment point-of-view, Ben Bova's "Venus" is certainly a gripping book.Unfortunately, the technical aspects of the book are just flat-out bad.If the book didn't try to take itself so seriously, you could think of it as being written in the style of the Golden Age of Science Fiction.But, Bova seems to have tried to update the book's style to better match today's books and failed:he lost the charm of the GAoSF and missed the boat technically.All he got was bad sci-fi.Some of the worst problems:

- The main character is a scientific dilettante.He brings nothing to the mission he's on and, really, shouldn't have been on it at all.
- The main character suffers from some kind of anemia.If he doesn't get his medication twice a day, he basically drops dead after a couple of days due to a lack of red blood cells.Yet, the life span of red blood cells is about 4 months.
- The prize for getting to Venus is $10 billion.It sounds like a lot of money, but in today's dollars, the cost of the spacecraft alone for the Apollo project was around $85 billion.There's no way that $10 billion dollars could even come close to covering the expenses of landing on Venus.And, the timeline for producing such ships is nonsensical.
- The time it takes to get from the asteroid belt and Earth to Venus doesn't seem to be correct.
- Even granting the existence of the problem-causing agent on Venus, it could never act as fast as it does.
- And (the big one), the characters throughout the book are just plain silly.No one behaves like this.This is especially true for the people who would be performing the missions described in the book.You could call the characters cardboard cut-outs, but that would be an insult to cardboard everywhere.The main character might be a useless dilettante with silly faults that would disqualify him for everything the book is about and who brings nothing to the book.But, he's orders of magnitude closer to a real character than anyone else in the book.

That's a lot of badness.But, because I found the book so riveting to read, by the end I felt I should upgrade my rating to something tolerable.So, overall, instead of giving the book the Bad rating I initially intended to, I'm upgrading that rating to an OK 3 stars out of 5.

Book became more interesting as I read further
When I first started reading this novel, the storyline seemed somewhat simplified - and a throwback to the pulp sci-fi stories (which isn't necessarily a bad thing). Bova's story is a quest to explore Venus, but thankfully turns into an interesting page turner.Yes, things seem to happen to easily in the beginning, but the characters and plot grow on you. By the middle of the book, it becomes a page turner.It's definitely worth picking up!

Good Drama, Unreal Characters, Seamful Integration
I am a great fan of SF and some parts of this book are excellent. The descent to the surface of Venus and the speculation about what could be there are great stuff. The story is well written and gripping in its drama. However the main character is completely unbelievable and Bova's politics are bolted on to both ends without any real connection to the story.

The protagonist is a spoiled degenerate who lives off his dad's wealth. Through a few unlikely twists he ends up on his way to Venus. After disaster, our young man becomes a hero. This deus ex machina may be necessary to the story, but given the man's demonstrated physical, emotional, and moral shortcomings it is unbelievable. The ending paragraph is laughable. Overall the ending reads like, "Oh, I've hit the publishers word count, time to wrap it up."

Many SF writers put their apparent political beliefs into their stories. Some are noticeably trotted out, while others are woven more subtly into the story. But at least they are an important part of the story, sometimes they are the story.Bova's opinion that the human race is destroying life on Earth is not an uncommon opinion and would be a good basis for an SF story, but has nothing to do with the story here. The obvious attempt to reference global warming is transparently contrived and is not a part of the story except it happens to be written there.

So, why 2 stars and not 1? I almost threw this book away (a Christmas present) after starting it. The paid ad political presentation, the unbelievable hero really are annoying. Something pulled me back to it. Good writing, he tells the action part of the story well.

Hard sci-fi pioneering space exploration at its very best!
Martin Humphries, a fabulously wealthy industrialist living on a lunar colony, passionately despises his second son, Van. Cruelly labeling him as "the runt" and bullying him relentlessly as a directionless, untalented weakling, Humphries blames Van for the death of his wife during Van's birth and, in fact, resents him for even being alive. Humphries' beloved eldest son, Alex, who Van also loved dearly, lost his life in the first manned exploration of the surface of Venus. When Humphries announces that he is terminating his son's stipend and that he is offering a $10 billion prize to the first person who recovers his beloved Alex's remains from Venus, it is quite clear that Van, who is without any other means of support, is being manipulated and forced by his own father into choosing a path that will likely lead to his death. The waters become muddied and the fight for that almost unimaginably large prize becomes a heated race when Lars Fuchs, a rock rat from the Asteroid belt and Humphries' long time corporate foe, announces he is also making a play for the prize.

"Venus" won't win any prizes when it comes to literary status. Nor does it convey any subliminal moral messages, political satire, mystical symbolism or any of those other things that deep thinkers often consider necessary for a novel to be deemed truly great. But if you're looking for a hard-driving plot with palpable suspense and superb hard science fiction supported by a wealth of current hard scientific fact, then "Venus" is a novel you'll want to read. Bova's ability to weave science seamlessly into a fast-paced plot is simply wonderful - orbital and celestial mechanics, plate tectonics, volcanism, planetary evolution, chemistry, biology, physics, aerospace engineering, rocketry and more. In fact, it's safe to say that Venus, with a hostile surface environment straight out of Dante's Inferno, is the major character in the novel!

But, let's take nothing away from the rest of the novel. Bova's characters, in a word, succeed! They evoke emotions in a reader fully ensnared in the action who will care about what happens. His heroes have their flaws and weaknesses but they're likable and they develop meaningfully over the course of the novel. His villains are despicable but they too evolve in an understandable human way. The dialogue is appropriate to the environment of a quasi-military space exploration vehicle. And the twist ending - well, suffice it to say that there is one! Let's not give anything away other than to say it will bring a smile to most reader's faces!

Highly recommended.

Paul Weiss

A Great Book From One Of Sci-Fi's Great Authors
Legendary science fiction author Ben Bova has created a thrilling and exciting tale about the planet which is most compared to earth: Venus.

Van Humphries is a spoiled rich kid who is detested by his father, multi-billionaire Martin Humphries.As much as Martin hates Van, he loved his older son, Alex, who disappeared three years earlier while exploring Venus.His ship disappeared, and he was never heard from again.Desparate to find out what happened to his beloved son, Martin decides to offer 10 billion dollars to the person who can bring back Alex's remains.To Martin's surprise, Van decides to take him up on the offer.Van is determined to rid himself of his father's wrath and find the brother he truly loved.But there's another challenger to the prize: Lars Fuchs.Lars is an asteroid miner who has a long and dubious past of his own with Martin Humphries.He's just as determined as Van is to win the prize money.

Van has his own ship constructed and begins the two-month long journey to Venus.Upon arriving, His ship begins its descent through the thick clouds to the surface and, hopefully, to his brother's remains.But something unexpected has appeared in the clouds; millions of bugs who chew on the outside of the ship.Soon, Van and his crew are falling through the thick Venusian atmosphere.But, Lars' ship comes to the rescue and takes Van and his surviving crew members aboard his ship.Once on board, Lars wastes no time in declaring himself the leader of the mission, and Van and his crew are to follow all of his orders.

What happens throughout the remainder of the book is a collection of involvements between Fuchs, Van, and Marguerite, a biologist who came from Van's ship.Each of their lives will be forever changed as the ship begins its descent to the rocky surface of Venus.Will they find Alex's remains?What other secrets will be revealed between Lars and Van?

This is an excellent novel.The story is well-conceived and the characters are very life-like.Its exciting to watch the transformation of Van and Lars as the story goes along.This book is definitely a page-turner.If you're a fan of good science fiction, then you'll definitely want to read Venus; it's hot!



... Read more

Product Description
Attempting to maintain a shaky peace agreement, the leaders of a utopian world send thousands of scientists and their families into exile on an orbital station, until freedom fighter Lou Christopher plans an escape to the stars. Reprint. K. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (8)

Great classic scifi
Ever wonder who first came up with the idea of a space ship crew's descendants reverting to primitivism. Ben Bova thought of it first.

Great sci-fi that should be made into movies!
Someone recommended Bova's EXILES trilogy to me and at first, when I read the description, I wasn't too sold on the idea but I went ahead and decided to take in this adventure.

The three books that make up this trilogy are as different as different can be. EXILED FROM EARTH, the first in the series, was my least favorite. In fact, after reading it, I wasn't sure I wanted to read the rest of the series. It basically focuses on the world government forcing many scientists off Earth and onto a satellite that orbits Earth. It ends with the exiled crew voting to turn their satellite/prison into a spaceship that will carry them to another planet so that they can live in freedom once again. There's a lot of pulp-style action in it but a lot of it just wasn't very compelling and didn't make sense, ie, Lou escapes capture only to immediately return to work and grow suspicious that the place is deserted and then acts surprised when they come to capture him again. Unfortunately, if you're going to read any of this series, the first book is necessary to set up the real stories to come later on. I don't think the first book would make a good movie at all. On the bright side, it's a short, quick read.

However, book two is where things really get cooking. FLIGHT OF EXILES is somewhat of a murder mystery/political drama played out in space. The situation was much more compelling, as were the characters. This would make an excellent Sci-Fi channel movie-of-the-week.

My favorite book in the series was definitely book three - END OF EXILE. Talk about coming out of left field! It focuses on Linc, a kid amongst many other kids on the now century old, falling apart spaceship. There is almost no explanation given as to what happened to the adults in the prior book. Bova does a great job of leaving stuff up to the reader's imagination and I'm glad about that because I didn't necessarily want him to break away from the story he's telling here to take a time out and fill in the blanks. The story plays out almost like a LORD OF THE FLIES in space. There are a lot of themes about religion and faith - Linc ascending "up" the ship to consult Jerlet (more or less, God in this story) and then coming back ("resurrected") to face the masses and lead them to salvation. This third book would make an excellent made-for-tv movie.

Space Trial and Errof
Monday, April 10, 2006
"The Exiles Trilogy" by Ben Bova, ©1971, 1972, 1975
This has to be one of the most presceint science fiction stories. The first part is developing the scene, so to speak: the exiles are exiled. The rationale is good and still a little far fetched. I do not see any government, national or international, sending a bunch of people off into space because they know, or have learned, too much. The idea is that there has to be some push to get us, as a species into the interstellar world. This was this story's push.
The second story I just of skimmed through. It was a predictable plot and the science in it did not seem to be of any great imagination. In the end, it was as I expected.
The third story was better and more interesting. The flaws were in its miracle work: how do those machines stay working or where do the replacement parts come from? It must have been some great foresight to have all the labatory equipment for developing zygotes and nuturing them to childhood. Why are these children not active sexually (obviously, the author did not want to deal with the inherent social problems, within and outside the book, that would ensue, but I think that children naturally have a curiousity about their bodies and sex, so there should have been some development)?
The growth and development of the characters was good, though, for purporting to be geniuses, they sure did not think things through very much. Some of the logic of what they were doing was just os much ordinary folks doing ordinary stuff, creating problems that required some adjustments. The sad part is that the children ended up on a virtual Eden, with all the hope that entails, but you know that problems will begin, and evil will enter the world. This will necissitate more growth and development, probably for the next million years or so. Lord be with us.
I find that the more I read science fiction books the more I am aware of the probability of finding and colonizing a planet like Earth is about nil. Taken separately: Finding: Is there a possibility of there being a planet out there like Earth? I would think that there is almost no likelyhood of it being one of the first planets we explore. I can not imagine that with all the ranges of planetary development, that one like ours would be nearby. Colonizing: the growth and development of our species to be able to develop machines and conquer the distances between planets, much less stars, is one thing, to do so with our social structures, would require a bit of growth and change. Other books have shown some different scenerios, not all of them are good, some are really bad.

A classic
I read this book when I was about 16, and it was one of the works that really got me hooked on this genre. Although I don't read much science fiction any more, I look back at this one as a great example of character building, plot development, and pure suspense mixed up with a good dose of plausible technology and fantastic imagery. Well done, Dr. Bova, and thanks for giving the world a great science fiction trilogy.

Simple and brilliant
BRIEF SUMMARY:
The exile of reason from human life drives an impassioned quest for intellectual understanding. Lou Christopher contemptuously writes off the world's rejection of reason and indifference to the forced exile of its greatest minds. Caught in a power struggle over her destiny, Valery Loring emerges triumphant on the premise that human freedom lies in a basic choice: to think or not to think. His thinking undercut by superstition-still, Linc must know before he can decide to save himself and his peers from disaster.

AN OPEN LETTER TO BEN BOVA:

Dear Mr. Bova,

I am writing to thank you for creating The Exiles Trilogy. I have read many of your novels, but regard The Exiles Trilogy as your greatest work. I first read it when I was thirteen, and recently bought a new copy. Today, at twenty-seven, I am just as moved by your heroic vision as I was fourteen years ago.

Back then I could not explain my emotional response to what your heroes sought and why. But I have learned much in the last few years, and I am deeply indebted to you. The Exiles Trilogy dramatizes the importance of the human mind and the value of human beings. It confirms an intense conviction that, until a few years ago, I had only sensed: that my own life is important -- an end in itself to be nurtured and kept, not sacrificed to the ignorant of the world or to the whims of brutes.

I do not presume to know your explicit philosophical beliefs. What is important is that your saga dramatizes, in terse plot structure and characterization, the rejection of the mind and its exile from human existence. Your heroes' struggles and ultimate triumphs suggest an impassioned plea, by you, for man to discover and embrace his own rational nature. Intellectual understanding is something I had continually sought as a teenager, but never found. I sensed only on an emotional level the life-preserving connection between thought and action, that action without thought leads nowhere, that to think or not is the fundamental choice and issue of human existence. Without a dramatic example like The Exiles Trilogy, my emotion would have remained precarious; your story bought me time to make explicit the important sense I had of myself and of life.

Your heroes are tremendous; their actions and purposes are a joy to contemplate. Not only do they possess great physical prowess, they also recognize and deal with their conflicts at the deepest level. They share a common quest for intellectual understanding. Lou Christopher, a computer engineer resolved to continue his life's work in exile, grasps the government's aimless, brutish nature; the people's indifference to the scientists' plight; the world's ignorance of the mind. He persuades the exiled scientists to turn their orbiting gulag into a purposeful starship. Valery Loring, a computer programmer determined to control her own life, is caught in a futile power struggle which threatens to destroy the ship and all aboard. In her search for truth she embodies the locus of human freedom, the choice to think. Linc, an active-minded boy stifled by hostile, superstitious peers and by his own fears, senses danger to them all. Still, Linc must know before he can decide to save himself and his friends.

It is not as if your heroes could decide, act, and triumph without knowing -- as if reason was desirable but optional. Your universe succinctly dramatizes the inescapable connection between individual thinking and human survival. This is what makes the heroes of The Exiles Trilogy so real and compelling.

I was a structural engineer at NASA/JSC for seven years before I quit in order to become a professional philosopher and intellectual. My favorite philosopher and top hero is Ayn Rand; perhaps you have heard of her. I highly recommend her novels. For The Exiles Trilogy you are my hero and mentor, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Respectfully yours,
Neil Erian ... Read more

Product Description

Customer Reviews (9)

A new low watermark for SF writing
Plenty of other reviews here go over the "plot" of this turkey. Warning: SPOILER ALERT. I'd like to tell you why this is one of the worst SF novels I've read in over 50 years.

Bova doesn't give us a single believable character, motivation or relationship.

Think about it. The bad guys want to do away with our hero. Since Wilie Coyote is not available, they come up with plan (a), which is to capture a British POW of the Japanese who was subsequently captured by the Russians and brainwashed (Korean Candidate style) so that he would feed PCP to a young astronemer and hyptnotize him into attacking Stone, who is a black belt in something dangerous. Plan (b) is to sneak a bomb onto a "tanker" rocket that's bound to rendevous with our hero nearly a million miles from Earth.What ever happened to knives, guns and poison? And, while we're at it, why do the bad guys want to kill our hero in the first place?

The British POW is presented as a cardboard characture. He doesn't talk like a real brit of that generation (like my mother).

And consider the love interest, Jo. Obviously a knockout, though we are left to imagine the details. Unaccountably in love with our middle-aged hero before the story starts. Strips and jumps his bones to prove she cares. Sleeps with the villian to protect her true love. Again, we have a villian without a clear motive. He's just nasty, fat, old, smelly and he has erectile disfunction. He pretty well drops out of the plot midway and all that pent up disgust the reader has developed for him is wasted.

Much of the action takes place at the Kwajalein base. Ben Bova has apparently never been to this base, which isn't much of a problem for readers since very few people have. But I was there at about the time this story takes place. As Bova walked me around his fantasy base, it just reminded how the entire story was just unwinding on automatic. Too bad. That base is a fascinating place. You write 100 novels about it.

At last, we have the grand finale in which Jo is reassured that Stoner really loves her. Stoner invests a few of his last words to testify that he's loved her from the beginning when we know that he completely ignored her at until their preposterous first love scene. Does anybody proof read these things?

If you subtract the vapid religious overtones, the political intrigue, the 14-year-old wet dream sex and the silly plots of implausible villians, you're left with a pretty good idea. Maybe enough for a short story. If you want a five star treatment of a very similar theme, check out "Camoflage" by Joe Haldeman.

Received quickly, in good condition
Have not had time to read it yet, looking forward to it.Ben Bova is a great writer and one of the best in science fiction. Book was delivered quickly, and is in good condition.

Great Read.
I really enjoyed this book as I do with most Ben Bova titles.I'm looking forward to reading the second in the series.

Not what it's advertised to be
"Voyagers" is the first book of the "Voyagers" tetralogy and the first novel of his I've read. The novel was published in 1980 (for the 2005 audiobook version, Bova apparently revised the text).

"Voyagers" is billed as a "First Contact" novel, putting it in the same subgenre as Arthur C. Clarke's classic "Rendezvous with Rama." However, that's where the similarity ends. Unlike "Rama," "Voyagers" takes place mostly on the ground. It doesn't even get into space until chapter 40. This is a Book with a Message. It's sort of a modern, modified morality play, and although secularized, the religious overtones are discernible: The protagonist's "arc" goes from idealism to cynicism and melancholy to exaltation and redemption by sacrificing his life in the name of a higher ideal (here comes the Message), which is: If only we humans could outgrow our outmoded beliefs, blind fanaticism, mindless rivalries and proclivity for violence, we could unite as a species and rise to even greater heights of achievement and inspiration.

"Voyagers" takes us back to another time: The Cold War is on, and the US and the USSR face off across the Iron Curtain. Scientists in both countries detect strange radio emissions from Jupiter. The US's space telescope, the Big Eye (this was about 12 years before the Hubble), sees an object in Jupiter space that can't be anything but a spacecraft. The alien spacecraft leaves Jupiter orbit and heads for Earth. This is kept secret by both countries until it can't be hidden anymore. A joint US-Soviet team rides a Soviet spacecraft on a course to rendezvous with the alien.

However, this is preceded by chapters 1-39, which detail the collision of the main characters' profoundly dysfunctional lives with Cold War political machinations, and the tone of the book is pretty sour. The main characters are three: Keith Stoner, whose life and career have gone downhill since his astronaut days; Kirill Markov, a philandering Russian ethnolinguist; and Jo Camerata, a gorgeous, voluptuous, promiscuous young graduate student with a heart of gold, after whom most of the male characters in the book lust at one time or another. (Oh yeah, lots of them in academia.) None of these characters is particularly likeable to begin with (they more or less redeem themselves by the end), but they seem like saints compared to a gaggle of thoroughly disagreeable supporting characters, who include Markov's harridan wife, a British scientist and double agent with electrodes in his head, a homosexual French cosmologist and Catholic priest, and a young Dutch astronomer addicted to PCP. There is a poorly developed subplot involving a fundamentalist preacher, and an absurd subplot involving Soviet mind control that seems lifted right out of "The Manchurian Candidate."

Technology and politics: Technology advances so fast that techno-tales like "Voyagers" date rapidly. We expect futuristic gadgets in futuristic novels. "Voyagers" takes us back to a time of primitive computers and no fax machines, cell phones, CDs, digital cameras, printers, the Internet, email, the GPS, and smart devices. Back in 1980 nobody except a few experts could have predicted that in another decade, communism would fall and the USSR would cease to exist.

When we finally get a gander at the alien, he is absurdly humanoid, with bilateral symmetry and a head and four limbs and ribs and so forth. Bova gets a number of things wrong about Russia. Inexplicably, Bova's editor didn't catch his complete mangling of Russian patronymics. Also, the Russian space program doesn't use countdowns; that's an American invention, borrowed from a movie. (At the risk of being a nitpicker:) Just before launch, an official message is transmitted to the crew and the media by the Soviet president. While that certainly would have been possible, on such a momentous occasion, the message would more likely have come from the Soviet prime minister, who with rare exceptions in Soviet history was also the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which was the office with the real power. Some Soviet leaders held all three posts at once! One detail that stretches credulity to the breaking point is that a Soviet scientist who is also a spy could possess a largish suitcase that contains top-secret Soviet mind-control equipment (powered by a RADIOACTIVE ISOTOPE) and get it through security when bringing it to an American base!

While Bova's prose moves pretty well, and this book may be enjoyable to really devoted sci-fi fans, I found it lugubrious (now there's a $2 word!) at the beginning, cloying in the middle, and sappy at the end.

We are not alone!
In the 1980s the world is still under threat of nuclear annihilation, memories of the Bay of Pigs nightmare are still fresh and the Cold War is still very much a fact in the world's political life. Carl Sagan is at the height of his popularity. UFO sightings still occur with astonishing regularity. SETI (the search for extraterrestrial intelligence) is making headlines in the popular scientific press. The right wing fundamentalist Christian movement in the USA is gathering a full head of steam and preachers with the oratorical skill of Billy Graham can pack a stadium to the rafters. Radio astronomy is a relatively new science. The Roman Catholic Church is sensing that it is a diminishing influence in the first world so it is looking to increase its flock by ensuring its power base in the third world is strong. A woman in a position of influence or power is a rare phenomenon. The "publish or perish" culture in scientific circles outside of the Soviet Union is in full bloom.

This is the world in which Ben Bova has a team of radio astronomers detect a signal in orbit around Jupiter that is clearly the work of an intelligent extraterrestrial species. No space opera, hard-boiled action or fantastic imagined scientific technology here, I'm afraid! Bova simply asks us to contemplate how a real 1980s world with 1980s technology would react if it knew that an intelligent space-faring alien creature was headed in a craft towards earth.

What a simple but effective premise for an engaging story!

On the down side, Bova has taken a purely melodramatic, almost laughably soap opera approach to the development of the relationships between his characters in the story. The men in the story are either heroes or wimps and the chauvinism that they exhibit toward the single strong female character in the tale is beyond outrageous. That said, Bova has created a provoking tale of the possible effects of a close encounter of the third kind on world politics, religion, relationships, science, culture and mainstream life in the USA.

Despite the fact that virtually everything about the story is now seriously dated, it is simple (and I would suggest useful) for the reader to examine today's world and ask themselves the very same question. What would my world become if I suddenly KNEW that we were not alone, that we were about to be visited by an ambassador of an intelligent species that was clearly possessed of technology well beyond anything we could produce and whose motives, culture and language were completely unknown to us?

I thank Ben Bova for providing me with a basis to contemplating that most provocative question.

Recommended. ... Read more

Product Description
Visionary space industrialist Dan Randolph is dead-but his protégé, pilot Pancho Barnes, now sits on the board of his conglomerate. She has her work cut out for her. For Randolph's rival Martin Humphries still wants to control Astro and still wants to drive independent asteroid miners like Lars Fuchs out of business. Humphries wants revenge against Pancho-ands, most of all, he wants his old flame Amanda, who has become Lars Fuchs's wife.

In the struggle over the incalculable wealth of the Asteroid Belt, many will die-and many will achieve more than they ever dreamed was possible.
Amazon.com Review
Ben Bova's second installment in the Asteroid Wars series continues his trademark style, withcaricatured characters in a classic Greek dramatic structure duking it out against a high-tech, Libertarian-influenced, future-history backdrop. Billionaire jerk and womanizer Martin Humphries stirs the pot again, overcoming attempts to oust him from the Selene moon base. His grip on Humphries Space Systems and its economic scheming remains as tight as ever, but he still desires two things: control of the asteroid belt's rich resources and, of course, possession of the ever-elusive Amanda What's-her-name at the expense of likeable alpha male number two, gruff prospector Lars Fuchs. ("One look at Amanda's innocent blue eyes and full-bosomed figure and any man would be wild to have her." We're left to guess as to whether the "wide-eyed," "lusciously curved" Amanda has any other qualities, desirable or otherwise.)

For Bova fans, Rock Rats has it all--cool technology, whip-fast action, and choreographed intrigue--and this installment certainly ups the ante in the series. As Bova gravely notes, "[T]he Belt became the region where prospectors and miners could make fortunes for themselves, or die in the effort. Many of them died. More than a few were killed." --Paul Hughes ... Read more

Customer Reviews (22)

Good start, great climax, bad ending...
***SPOILER ALERT***
Ben Bova is a good story teller, no doubt. His writting will keep you turning the pages and finish the book in no time. The futuristic discription is gloomy, yet possible. He also does a decent job with technology, a must in any sci-fic book.

What he lacks is a better character development and a cheerer (that's not a word, right?) ending. Amanda, the sexy yet intellengent wife of Lars, devoices her husband in order to protect him from Humphries?!? What?! I thought this girl was supposed to be INTELLENGENT!!! And then there's George; dude was saved by Lars, probably his best friend, from a hopeless situation, and how does he thank him? By exiling him from Ceres, the moon, and the Earth....what?! I know Ben wants to keep the story open for the next book, but dude, at least make some sense!

Anyhow, besides the terrible ending the book is pretty decent and entertaining. I personally didn't read book One, I might, but book Three is out of the question, I read the review and can't stand any more mishape of Lars and Amanada (she stayed with Humphries, the man she hates, for years?!...well guess she's not so smart after all)

A Slow Starter
Not being a major fan of Ben Bova, I was interested in the comments made by some reviewers who obviously are fans. The harsh criticisms levelled at "The Rock Rats" were quite interesting. While I would not lambast the book as complete rubbish, it certainly lacked something that the previous novel, The Precipice (The Grand Tour; also Asteroid Wars), had.

The plot basically follows on from the first novel, (with some large jumps in time), and focuses on Martin Humphries' attempts to tighten his grip on control of the asteroid belt and its super-abundant resources and profits. Of course, being a rather morally challenged villain, he uses some nasty methods. Up against this behemoth of industry is Lars Fuchs, protege and beneficiary of Dan Rudolph. With a large number of subplots going on, there is much more to it than this simplistic summary.

One reviewer commented that the story jumps about a bit. While this is true, with jumps of dossiers on characters and so on, I feel this does not detract from the novel itself. The brief episodes add an air of anticipation, I thought, as I wondered how these people would fit in. The only thing that annoyed me a bit was the so-called "dossiers" were in very novel-like language, hardly anything like that of real dossiers. They just didn't seem convincing.

The plot itself takes longer to wind up than the previous novel of the series. For about the first 100 pages, I found it a bit of a chore, to be honest. Once I got into the second century of pages, things started to move, finally. The adventure was back and the conflict reached a new level.

I would also add this: Lars Fuchs seems an odd sort of main character for this type of role. He just seems a bit more wishy washy than most, and seemed less than adequate. When he finally gets some substance, the novel ends. This might be overly critical, but I thought the character of Dan Randolph had much more substance, as did many of the subsidiary characters.

While not as good as "The Precipice", I still enjoyed this installment of "The Asteroid Wars". The read is simple and does not require lots of brain power. It is a good relaxing jaunt through the solar system neighbourhood that Earth is in.

Disappointment.
I purchased this book and it's predecessor together based on the author's name. Ben Bova. A fourth of the way through the first book I felt cheated.

The progression of the story isn't smooth at all. It jerks and jumps and drags. The situations aren't believable and there are large gaps in the rationalization of "WHY".You know, "WHY" this or that happens."WHY" these people do this or that. The reasons just aren't there.Worst of all, the characters don't behave like actual people, their decisions are obviously made to push along this stubborn mule of a story. And believe me, this mule doesn't wanna go anywhere.

Like I said earlier, I purchased books I and II together.I forced myself to read the second book as punishment for believing the hype of a big name science fiction writer. Surprise, surprise, it was like trying to slog my way through mud. Mud that's up past your shins.You're forced to go slow,you can see all this mud in front of you and you just want to get to the end.

I do not recommend this book.

Bad editing and redundant narrative trumps space pirates
Book one was great, but Rock Rats is missing something.In addition to a few grammatical errors the book is over simplified.I found that I despised the way Bova reintroduced the characters and plot lines from the first book.There was a tendency to use narrative instead of letting character dialogue and scene description tell the story.But hey, its got space pirates, that's good.

The Asteroid Wars Heat Up
Ben Bova has written an exciting follow-up to "The Precipice".Once again, Martin Humphries and Lars Fuchs clash in this fast-paced novel.

At the end of The Precipice, Humphries was exiled from Selene and forced to give up all of his shares in Astro Manufacturing.Despite this, he still crashes Lars' and Amanda's wedding and gives them Starpower I as a wedding present.Martin secretly hopes that Lars will head to the Asteroid Belt alone and leave Amanda on Selene where he can get his hands on her, but she surprises Martin by leaving with Lars.

Martin has also developed a trading center on the asteroid Ceres.Here, Martin's company can supply the "Rock Rats" with all the supplies they need.In response, Amanda convinces Lars and Pancho to develop their own company to compete against Martin.Pancho's Astro company will provide the goods.Thus, Helvetia, Inc. was born and is now larger than Martin's company.

Understandably upset by Lars' latest move, Martin sends some of his own thugs to raid Helvetia's warehouse.In the ensuing melee, Lars loses all of his inventory and some of his employees are killed.But Matin doesn't stop with the warehouse.Soon, ships are disappearing and Martin's company is laying claim to many different asteroids.Even the chief director of the habitat project is killed.

Lars tracks down the killer and infuses a little frontier justice of his own.A court is convened, but Lars is found innocent.But Humphries is incensed.He sends Dorik Harbin, a hired assassin who's hooked on several different kinds of drugs, into the belt to hunt down Lars and kill him.However, Lars manages to give Harbin the slip, and Harbin is forced to return to Selene empty-handed.However, once there, he meets and begins a torrid affair with Diane Verwoerd, Martin's assistant.Martin has his own plan for Diane; namely, having her impregnated with his clone.But, Martin still has his sights set on Amanda and making her his own.Will he succeed?

This is a very good book.Although I preferred "The Precipice" slightly more, "The Rock Rats" is loaded with action, and the conflict between Martin and Lars explodes with fury.Bova fans won't want to miss this exciting continuation of the Asteroid Wars. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (25)

Earth to Mars in five days....
I stopped reading science fiction in the eighties for reasons many reviewers have already told hereand the only writer I still read and enjoy is BenBova maybe because he mixes nostalgia from fifties and sixties with true facts science knows today about spaceconditions for exploration.This is a goodbook if you like stories about Mars.Maybeit is te more realistic one I ever read and maybe what happens there during the storyis a possibility (but five days to go Mars...I doubt it).the only negative point is the extremehuman visionabout Mars. A lost civilization should be quite different from whathe drecribes...

Very good continuation of Bova's Mars dead civilization series
I really liked "Mars Life".The book is rich and fully builds on the previous two Mars dead civilization books.I think that the scientific solutions for travel to and from Mars, living on Mars, etc are very well thought out and plausible.Also the political funding issues are very real.

However, the conflicts between the Mars pioneers and the religious fundamentalists back on Earth are fairly overblown in my opinion.I cannot believe that church leaders would actually ask their churchgoers to promise to ignore the Mars exploration videos.And that the religious people would threaten the people who were independently funding the Mars exploration.

Too much political correctness
I have been a great fan of Bova over the years.This is evident by the number of Bova titles in my library.Unfortunately I have purchased my last Bova book.I am completely and totally fed up with the political correctness of the Progressives which is reflected in this novel.Scifi has been one way that I could escape the garbage being thrown upon us daily.Now I have to be subject to the Progressive Movement in my science fiction?I think not!!

There are two main themes in this book that offends me.First is the hoax of global warming.At this point in time global warming HAS BEEN PROVEN TO BE a product of bad science and political correctness.Bova is dedicated to this hoax in spite of the proof, as are most Progressives.Even worse is his attitude toward religion.As with most Progressives, he obviously feels that if you are a religious person you are some sort of radical.I am simply not interested in his attempts to modify my attitudes with propaganda in my casual reading.

We are being bombarded with this garbage from every direction.It is time to take a stand and say NO.I certainly have no intention of making a political statement here.However, Bova has done so in this book.I am simply responding to why I think it is a bad book.

Enjoyable but not satisfying
Ben Bova, with his Grand Tour books, has made the solar system come alive for his readers as he spins enjoyable yarns about mankind's expansion into the solar system.In this, his third book about Mars, he clearly outlines in his preface to the book his conviction that massive greenhouse flooding will accelerate a trend to ultra-conservative governments.He explores the negative impact this would have on the exploration of Mars, with the book opening with some 200 scientists from Earth and Selene investigating Mars on several fronts.Can nanotechologyhelp scientists maintain a presence on Mars, or should it be banned as it has been on Earth?Is Space Tourism an answer?Will we find out who built the cliff dwellings?Can Science and Religion work constructively together to improve our understanding of the history of life in our solar system?

While I enjoyed this book and kept reading just another chapter or three, to me the definitive science fiction series exploring Mars and humanity's varied responses to it still remain the Red/Green/Blue Mars series by Kim Stanley Robinson, which has far more realistic and multi-dimensional characters tackling similar themes in far greater depth than is done in Ben Bova's Mars trilogy.Red MarsGreen Mars (Voyager Classics)Blue Mars (Voyager Classics)The Martians

Mars is a bore.
Exploration never seemed so dull. Bova writes with great detail and realism, but little imagination. Random events occur, true to life, but a novel is a contrivance...something about Chekov's gun...if equipment randomly explodes it had better have consequences. The fundamentalist villains are cartoon bad guys when they do appear, but they tend to remain in the background. An America under their thumb would be a lot more interesting and full of drama. The book reads like an outline. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (4)

Quick delivery, book as described
I have not had time to read it yet, but looking forward to it as I always enjoy Ben Bova. Book was delivered quickly, and in the condition as described.

A strong, important message in a singularly unimpressive wrapper!
A radio signal from a source near Jupiter announces to the scientists of this world that we are not alone. An intelligent extraterrestrial species is going to make a close fly-by to earth in a hyperbolic orbit of the sun that will allow one opportunity, and one opportunity only, to examine the starship, its occupants and its technology. In Voyager, the first novel of this trilogy, Keith Stoner, the American member of a joint US-Soviet mission to study the alien's ship, chose to stay aboard with the frozen alien's body. Knowing the rocket would rapidly move beyond the earth's ability to rescue him, he turned off his spacesuit's heaters and elected to flash freeze his body in the frigid temperatures of interplanetary space.

As Voyagers II opens, Keith Stoner awakes 18 years later in the laboratories of Vanguard Industries, the largest corporation on earth. Beyond all expectations, earth developed the technology to effect a rescue and somehow managed to revive his long frozen body from a state of suspended animation. His friend and erstwhile lover, Jo Camerata, using every resource at her disposal, has scrambled to the top of the industrial world. She is the President of Vanguard and her husband, Everett Nielsen, is the Chairman of the Board. Vanguard appears to be in control of the vast knowledge and technology that the alien and the spaceship have to offer and intends to keep it and use it for its own financial gain. However, Stoner, who has an unexplainable mental link with the alien intends to explore earth and ensure the technology is offered openly to a needy and unseemly venal world destined to encounter one global disaster after another.

When I reviewed Voyagers some months ago, I criticized Bova for taking a melodramatic, soap opera approach to the development of the relationships between the characters in the story. The men were portrayed as either heroes or wimps and the chauvinism with which he allowed his male characters to treat the females was simply beyond outrageous. Unfortunately, this weakness continues in Voyagers II and sinks to even lower lows. His dialogue is wooden and terribly contrived - not a great deal more realistic than one might expect from the humorous mangled English subtitle translations of Japanese B movies. The maniacal primary motivation for the evildoers of the novel seems to be world domination in a style that is not quite as subtle as the overlords of James Bond's arch-foe SMERSH.

Despite its glaring apparent weaknesses, Bova has nevertheless created a provoking tale of the possible effects of a close encounter of the third kind on world politics, religion, relationships, science, culture and mainstream life in the USA. The overwhelming need to use such advances in technology for the betterment of the world is obviously uppermost in Bova's mind and still makes Voyagers II an interesting read - if not one with an abundance of literary values. Which is certainly a shame! It isn't without merit but, as a novel, it's a bit of a disappointment.

Recommended, but only barely.

Paul Weiss

jacket summary
from the back cover of the January 1987 TOR paperback edition
cover art by Boris Vallejo
When Keith Stoner awoke, he found himself in a world changed almost beyond recognition.Eighteen years before, Stoner had been the American member of a joint US-Soviet mission to capture an alien ship, which had entered the solar system.It was the greatest adventure in the history of Earth-but disaster struck when a bomb placed on the Soviet craft forced its recall.Stoner refused to allow such a gift to escape humankind, and removing his spacesuit within the strange ship, fell into suspended animation.
Jo Camerata, the ambitious young student who fell in love with Stoner, is now head of Vanguard Industries.Jo's dogged determination has forced the recovery of the alien ship, and now her company is in control of the vast new technology and the fortune it reaps-and in control of Keith Stoner.What Camerata doesn't know, however, is that someone else has been awake; someone who dwells within Stoner's mind.The alien presence that has kept Stoner alive all these years is now free, and intends to explore our world.
And will let nothing stand in its way.

Foresight
I read this book when i was still in High School a number of years ago, but still the distinctness of the book lingers on in my memory. I enjoyed Sci-Fi before i read this book, and after? Well writing reviews and looking every where for Ben Bova. I enjoyed the book because it focused not only on what could be, what what in actual fact is. The Vanguard coorporation if my memory serves, reflects metaphorically with the way our world is now. It moved me from being being "a simple fish in the waters of life" to being aware of my environment, being aware that there is more than what meets the eye. The technology described in the book was, to me, fantastic, so fantastic that it tantalised the senses and made me want to go out and study science and make that technology possible. I have in my life only read three Ben Bova book, not by any chance by choice, but simply because where i am they are hard to find. Orion, another throughly enjoyable book, shares the same mystisism with Voyager 11, and also displays our Theological dispositions. Voyager 11, displayed the Alien that is within our very midst and the human potential that has only just begun to be tapped. Definitely one of the best books i have ever read. I question and because i cannot find the answer, i search. Thanks Ben.. ... Read more

Product Description
Once, Dan Randolph was one of the richest men on Earth. Now the planet is spiraling into environmental disaster, with floods and earthquakes destroying the lives of millions. Randolph knows the energy and natural resources of space can save Earth's economy, but the price may be the loss of the only thing he has left--the company he founded, Astro Manufacturing.
Martin Humphries, fabulously wealthy heir of the Humphries Trust, also knows that space-based industry is the way of the future. But unlike Randolph, he doesn't care if Earth perishes in the process. And he knows that the perfect bait to ensnare Dan Randolph--and take control of Astro--is his revolutionary new fusion propulsion system.

As Randolph--accompanied by two fascinating women who are also brilliant astronauts--flies out to the Asteroid Belt aboard a fusion-propelled spacecraft, Humphries makes his move. The future of mankind lies in Randolph's hands.

The Asteroid Wars have begun.
... Read more

Customer Reviews (24)

just not there
Sorry Ben, I can't even finish it. You should get a new editor. Lots of great ideas that just don't manage to pan out. I just kept hoping (expecting) it would get better. Then I read the reviews here and realized, its not going to get better. It just as superficial all the way through. I have so little time to read and live in these wonderful Sci-Fi worlds. I need to use my time to enjoy one that truly takes me away from the present day. I honestly don't mean any disrespect but I cannot recommend this book to anyone. This one needed another draft. In fact, I'm wondering if maybe you are letting someone else write your books now, outsourcing, taking advantage of writer mills maybe. I'm sorry. It just wasn't up to the stature of your reputation.

My Last Bova Book
I've read Bova off and on for the last decade or so with mixed results. I've never been wowed by this author and my view of his books could best be described as tepid. But the back cover for Precipice was intriguing enough that I decided to give it a go. Unfortunately, in this case, I was wowed at the awfulness of this book.

Truthfully, the first two-thirds of this book aren't bad. They aren't all that good, but they're not terrible. Sure you have Bova's repeated jabs at the Religious Right (oops, New Morality) and belaboring the consequences of global warming, that's the foundation of the story after all. I don't have a problem with global warming as a plot device, after all it's been done many times. But to say that Bova belabors the point would be a gross understatement. Still, it (again, the first two-thirds) was relatively entertaining.

But that last third...it was interminably slow. I couldn't wait for it to end. Bova wrung out every single drop of tension and/or drama and instead swapped it for melodramatic fluff. And his characters were absurd caricatures. Humphrey's infatuation with Amanda (a peripheral character at best) seemed superfluous. Having her marry another peripheral character in a later scene could only be described as embarrassing. Bova could have stripped out the meaningless interplays by the minor characters (Amanda, Cardenas, George, et al) and the story would have suffered not a whit.

And then there was the way it ended - a total let down. Obviously the intent was for this to be a series but I've never seen a first book in a series ended with a cliffhanger like this. I can almost imagine him saying, "Ha ha, now you HAVE to read the next book."

I can forgive Bova for harping on the stupidity of ignoring global warming. I can overlook his continual railing against the Religious Ri...sorry, New Morality...even having his main character compare them, albeit obliquely, to the Nazis. What I can't forgive is the sloppy writing, soap opera-like characters, and tedious padding.

Bova, you and me is quits.

Great page turner!!!!
I liked the book.This is my first Ben Bova book, and I like his writing.The things that I liked about the book:
1.Solid science.From the description of the Lunar environment to the Fusion drive to the types of asteroids, Ben gets it right on the science in this fiction.Very plausible.
2.Politics, Religion, and Business are part of the story and are treated seriously.We live in a complicated world.In the future, society will be just as complicate if not more.All three play a part in every meaningful endeavor.
3.3rd person narrative.I like complete descriptions of the environments and people and technology.I am weary of the 1st person narrative (see my review of "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress".
4.Character development.Ben puts in a lot of effort to create 3-D characters.I appreciate that.All except for two characters seem realistic.
5.This book is an absolute page turner.Very short, easily digestible chapters; lots of scene changes, and lots of plot twists; and complete descriptions make this an extremely readable book and fun book.Readability and the science are the best features of this book.


What I did not like about the book:
1.A tiny bit of implausible technology found in the __________ suit.This is too bad.
2.Global Warming!!!!It helps drive the plot and the story, but it's a little over the top.
3.The author's dislike of the religious right is palpable.Nice job Ben setting up the "New Morality" as a nice trusty prop (or strawman) for your characters to knockdown throughout the book."Ooh look I was able to knock down the card board cut-out of religious people.Let's pick up the cardboard cut-out and knock it down again!!!!".Also, I find it interesting that the religious right in Ben Bova's future is powerful enough to ruin a scientist's career if they pursue their scientific endeavors.But in today's reality, a scientist's career is ruined by the scientific establishment if he/she even entertains the concept that life could have been started by an Intelligent Designer.
4.Stop writing about love Ben.You turn the book into a soap opera.The soap opera works for one book but makes me hesitate to pick up the sequels.
5.There is one character who is so apparently so BEAUTIFUL it's as if the goddess Aphrodite came down to earth to dwell with mankind.I've yet to even meet or see such a woman this beautiful, apparently.This woman is Jennifer Lopez + Angelina Jolie with enhancements.Ben you don't need a demigoddess to drive your story.Honestly, every other sentence goes "she would look voluptuous in an oversized eskimo's parka".
The other unbelievable character is Humphries."Humpheries is sooooooo evil.""How evil is he?""Humphries is soooo evil that you can imagine him having the evil Vincent Price laugh after every scene."Let's compare him to another bad guy.Darth Vader is someone who is evil but he is also cool.Humphries is easy to hate, but he is not cool.Darth Vader is evil but you don't want him to die.For all I care Humprhies can be capped just as soon as he is introduced in this book.Perhaps that is what Ben intended to create, but I doubt it.
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I started out giving the book 4.5 stars, but the soap opera knocks it down to 3.5 stars.I'll give it 4 this time, but I am not interested in reading about these same characters again in the sequel.I'll read an unrelated Ben Bova book next.

Good but not great
I have read 4 or 5 books by Bova.I like the fairly straightforward near future sci fi writing style he has, and I particularly liked the two moon books.This book reminds me of the moon books except it has less of the beaurocratic new morality thesis and more of the ego-maniacal power hungry Humphries character.Humphries ability to have spooks everywhere and to know everything that is going on is a little far fetched, but nota major flaw.

This book is basically abour Dan Randolph wanting to go the asteroid belt with a new fusion drive to mine asteroids to save earth.The downside is that there is 400 pages of this and at then end they only just get there.The in-between stuff kept me interested enough to plow through the book fairly quickly for me, but for some others I could see boredom setting in.

I liked this book better than Jupiter, which I found really dull and drawn out.I appreciate Bova's prescience about fundamentalists controlling govt and the repurcussions of that, but sometimes these people annoy me just like they do in real life!But i have to give it to the guy, he wrote a lot of this stuff before the Bush years which tend to mirror his idea of the New Morality and "God" dictating science, and how people live.

This book is average but an easy read...Enjoy!

Mankind on the brink!
With the mindless inevitability and unstoppable madness of a great mass of migratory lemmings, mankind is hurtling over a metaphorical precipice. Global warming and climatic change has driven humanity to the brink of extinction. The greenhouse effect has taken hold, icecaps are melting, damage from superstorms is beyond calculation, ocean levels are rising, coastlines are flooding and famine and pestilence are endemic. The ultra-right wing self-serving religious group, "The New Morality", has stepped into the political void ruling earth with a vicious, dictatorial stranglehold insisting upon blind obedience to its dictums which include, among other things, a prohibition against new science such as nanotechnology that might be crucial to saving the earth.

Dan Randolph is the CEO of Astro Manufacturing, a business behemoth which, unlike so many of its other corporate competitors, realistically pursues its profits but does so with a healthy dose of optimistic compassion and altruism. Recent financial difficulties, caused by the restrictions imposed on Astro by The New Morality, have forced Randolph to seek a business partnership to finance the development of a practical fusion rocket- a rocket built with the most up to date innovations in nanotechnology that will allow mankind to reach the Asteroid belt, a virtually limitless supply of industrial resource minerals and, perhaps even more important, an unimaginably vast source of fresh water in the form of ice.

The only pockets deep enough to contemplate bankrolling such a venture belong to Martin Humphries, a corporate baron who easily admits his only motives are wealth and power. While he also recognizes the likelihood that the fusion rocket is mankind's potential saviour, his only interest in the project is what it can do for his pocketbook. In the bargain, he positively lusts after the possibility of absorbing Astro Inc into his own corporate empire and putting Dan Randolph out onto the streets.

Randolph and Humphries recruit the crew for the ship, Starpower I - Pancho Lane, a wily, strong-willed and often outspoken but very feminine woman who is nevertheless comfortable with her skills and top-notch abilities as a pilot; Amanda Cunningham, on the other hand, is an equally feminine but rather more shy soft-spoken woman who is most uncomfortable with her innate ability to suck the oxygen from a room merely by virtue of her outrageous beauty; Lars Fuchs is a dedicated scientist, an intense man who quietly focuses on whatever engineering or science problem has been placed in front of him that day. Against the direct orders of The New Morality and under Humphries' very nose, Randolph and his crew take off on Starpower I and begin their long voyage to the Asteroid Belt.

Ben Bova has found a brilliant recipe that works and he certainly hasn't changed it in "The Precipice" - one part hard-core sci-fi; one part corporate potboiler; one part political intrigue; and one part primetime soap opera. His characters are wonderfully deep and realistic. Although that deeply entrenched sexism still seems to come through, it seems to manifest itself primarily in his male characters. The female protagonists are strong, talented, well-spoken and are pushovers to no man's whim. Humphries is the ultimate bad buy that every reader will love to hate and there won't be a single reader that isn't cheering Randolph on as he battles against Humphries and The New Morality.

Ben Bova's science is wonderful, well-explained without being simplistic and used to great advantage in the development of the story - nanotechnology; fusion rockets; invisibility cloaks (for those that think this is unrealistic drivel, I would recommend you take a look at Machio Kiku's "Physics of the Impossible"; solar flares and gamma radiation; interplanetary space travel and its inherent dangers; the realities of permanent space bases on the moon and beyond; the structure of asteroids; the climatic effects of global warming; and much more.

I have yet to meet the Ben Bova novel that I didn't enjoy and, for what it's worth, this is one of the best. "The Precipice" is part of the "Grand Tour of the Universe" series and the first in a sub-series trilogy entitled "The Asteroid Wars". I'm certainly looking forward to the second and third novels in the series, "The Rock Rats" and "The Silent War". Count me as a continuing fan, Mr Bova.

Paul Weiss ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (9)

Excellent and entertaining historical fiction!!!
I'm an avid reader of historical fiction and so glad I bought this book. There just aren't enough historical novels out there on ancient times and this retelling of the Trojan War is a welcome addition to the genre.The cover grabbed me right away.I don't agree with a couple of the other reviewers who gave the cover a negative review.I'm a librarian and I see a lot of romance covers come through our library and this does NOT look like a romance cover.It has more of a Prince of Persia look to it and I think it would grab the attention of both men and women. The story appeals to both men and women too and is a compulsive read that captures the time period perfectly.It starts off from the Hittite Lukka's point of view, but women will enjoy the book too because it also shifts to tell Helen's story. I don't want to give too much away.I'm so hoping for a sequel.

For all the title, this is more of a retelling of "The Iliad" from a slightly different perspective
I picked this one up due to a recently acquired interest in the history of the Sumerians, Assyrians, Egypt and their neighbours. There aren't that many novels set in this period (broad as it is.....) and this seemed like it had potential. That said, I agree with many of Stuart's comments in his review - while the author seems to know his stuff, he's condensed a number of historical events for no good reason, the historical events used as background seem out of whack and chunks of the storyline seem a little forced. From the title, I was looking for a bit more in the way of "Hittite" themes and background woven into the book and that was certainly missing.

That said, ignore these failings and it's an entertaining reinterpretation of the Iliad using an "outsider" to give a different point of view. I certainly enjoyed it myself and if there's a sequel, I'd more than likely pick it up.

And as for Harriet's review - I despair. As far as I can recall, there's no mention of the "Emporer" of the Hatti being stripped of his clothes. I fear Harriet may have read a publicity review or perhaps got this mixed up with another book.

Interesting variant on the Iliad
The Iliad, supposedly the fount of western literature, is sometimes difficult--leaving out the capricious gods--difficult to handle.
It's about the wrath of Achilles?The whole Achaian effort stands and falls on this guy?
A hollow horse fooled the Trojans???
To paraphrase historians Edith Hamilton and Geoffrey Ashe, you should never take myths literally but you should always take them seriously.
Bova does, with mixed results. It is an ingenious view of where the "horse" theme came from--you'll have to read the book--and what drove Achilles might be more believable if you know the guy isn't quite right in the head to start with and his fearful combat skills are a combination of wiry speed, training, preternaturally fast reflexes, and the old saying, "If you ain't afraid to die, you won't." seems to help.
The protagonist, Lukka, is set on his way by the chaos in the Hittite empire caused by civil war.
Most historical novels have to take their protagonists and position them to pass through, or participate in, notable events.It does no good, as I've said in other reviews, to try to write a story about a soldier who follows the soldier in front of him to Waterloo where they shoot, are shot, and eventually discover if they've won or lost.So it does take some ingenuity on the part of the author to spring his hero from the usual restrictions.In this case Lukka, a squad leader in the Hittite Army, returns from campaign to find the empire in ruins, with brigandage and raids and death on every side.His wife and children are taken as slaves, which has the dual purpose of giving him no reason to hang around, and a serious reason to go searching instead of finding a place to set up for himself.His soldiers, some of them, are cut loose for some of the same reasons, giving him enough combat power, a dozen professional long-serving troops among bandits and peasants, to believably get where he needs to get without having his throat cut a score of times among the anarchy.
Eventually, he follows the track of the slavers to the Troad, finding the Trojan War going on.
He encounters Odysseus and becomes attached to his entourage, following him to one encounter or another we hear about in Homer, and getting a view of the man.
Here Bova makes a serious distinction which reminded me of a bit from Tuchman's "A Distant Mirror; The Calamitous Fourteenth Century" about Europe and the Hundred Years War.Children died so early so frequently that, she said, their parents rarely invested much emotional energy in them until age five or so.From that, she suggests that some of the statecraft, warcraft, and other puzzles of the age are the result of kings, dukes and others in a kind of arrested adolescence.
Real armies need grownups.They find them, or train them.Odysseus is an adult amid a sea of over-muscled, honor-seeking kids, which explains the effects and utility of his counsels. Lukka and his soldiers are, by training, adults as well, which is one reason Odysseus likes having them. Bova's battle scenes of chaos, confusion, and slaughter make make one wonder about having the Trojans or the Achaians face a Classical Greek phalanx, or a Roman legion.
This is written in the first person, so we see what the thing looks like to an experienced professional soldier--pretty sloppy.
In the end, Lukka makes possible the successful assault on Troy, then finds his wife--and loses her--and his sons and makes his escape with...Helen.With a few of his soldiers, the character later called Homer, and his sons, they wander toward Egypt, hoping to avoid Menalaus' searchers.
I see a sequel, presuming one hasn't already been written.
It's an interesting book, a good read.
I do think an earlier reviewer had something right about the cover.Doesn't strike me that a Hittite professional soldier would look like an alumnus of a boy band with hair extenders.
The ins and outs of Bronze Age warfare and associated activities seem reasonable and interesting.

The Hittite
A different take on the Trojan War and a quite unique one at that.Bova has retold one of the most retold stories in literature and managed to give it fresh view.The main character, Lukka, is a Hittite officer who leads his squad of soldiers in a search for kidnapped and presumably enslaved wife and children.His search takes him to Troy where he plans to ask Priam from help in his search.Instead, he is cut off from the city by the Greek army. He enlists with Odysseus's troops and fights (and survives) against the Trojan hero, Hector.Odysseus uses Lukka as an ambassador to the Trojans twice.In the city, he meets the beautiful Helen and can't get her out his mind afterward.
Bova takes the historical figures and give us great character sketches: Achilles, Agamemnon and Menalaos are all portrayed vividly.
There several twists on the usual events that are reputed to take have taken place once the walls were breached, but I'm not going to give them away.I've read a number of Trojan War stories and this has to rank up there with the best of them.
Four out of five stars

Tunnel Vision

History,romance and a twist ending!!
If you love history,adventure,romance and a mystery thriller then The Hittite by Ben Bova is the book for you! Once started, I couldn't put it down. It's a real page turner,a convincing and inventive retelling of the legend of Troy. It has an interesting and believable twist! The Hittite is an adventure you'll want to undertake and be looking for more at the end of the book.
Historical figures and concepts are incorporated into the novel in an acceptable manner.
Mr.Bova has done his research. He takes recently discovered facts concerning the Hittites, their empire and military proficiency and turns the myth of Troy into a believable novel.
If you are a connoisseur of ancient history The Hittite will make sense and as the ending is left open there is a possibility for a sequel...I hope the author feels the same.
I highly recommend this book!
I read a few comments that questioned Mr. Bova's research....
if you are trully interested in the veracity of historical facts in the book then try:
Trevor Bryce
J.G.Mcqueen
Joachim Lactaz
and J.D.Hawkins to name a few.
These people are experts in their field of Hittite history, archeology and language.
"New evidence leads to these conclusions....recent excavations of 13th century Troy and translations of Hittite Tablets(by J.D.Hawkins)and an archelogical enterprise under the direction of of Manfred Korfman authenticates Mr.Bova's conclusions of Hittite and Tojan history and involvement.

Rebutal to Stuart McCunn: The only item I agree with you is the cover art: Lukka could have been portrayed more authentically and I would rather imagine Helen for myself. It had the look of a romance novel. But I do believe that cover art is more in the hands of the publisher than the author.
The story....well written or not....is your own opinoin and we are all entitled to that, although again I disagree with your analasys.
I draw the line at your conjecture of historical inaccuracies. To pit another novelist as comparison...a fiction writer himself is ludicrous.
Try the above named archeologists,historians and Hittite language translators who are experts in their fields.!
And you will see the Mr.Bova "is on time and on target"!

... Read more

Product Description

Six years after the first manned Martian expedition, a second has been announced -- one motivated purely by its profitable potential -- and half-Navajo, half-Anglo geologist Jamie Waterman's conflicted soul is beckoning him back to the eerie, unforgiving planet.As commander of the new exploratory team, he will have to contend with a bitter and destructive rivalry, a disturbing new emotional attraction, and deadly, incomprehensible "accidents" that appear to be sabotage, all of which could doom the mission to failure.But there is much more at stake than Waterman's personal redemption and the safety of his crew.For there are still great secrets to be uncovered on this cruel and enigmatic world -- not the least being something he glimpsed in the far distance during his first Martian excursion:an improbable structure perched high in the planet's carmine cliffs; a dwelling that only an intelligent being could have built.Amazon.com Review
In Ben Bova's 1992 bestselling book Mars, geologist JamieWaterman and his crewmates discovered the existence of primitivelichen on the floor of the great Martian canyon known as the VallesMarineris. In Return to Mars, Waterman is headed back to theRed Planet, this time in charge of an expedition that hopes not onlyto study Martian life but also to prove that exploring Mars can beprofitable. Waterman also wants to revisit a part of the canyon wherehe thought he spotted a primitive cliff dwelling during the firstMartian mission. The second voyage to Mars runs into trouble rightaway, however, as Waterman clashes with Dex Trumball, the son of abillionaire who's backing the expedition. Dex wants to turn Mars intoa tourist attraction, while Waterman wants to preserve the planet forscientific research. Both men are also attracted to the expedition'sbeautiful psychologist, Vijay Shektar, who can't seem to decide whichof the two she likes best. As if that weren't enough, one of the Marsteam may be trying to sabotage the mission, while back home the elderTrumball is pulling strings in order to force Waterman to step down asthe expedition's leader.

Like Jamie Waterman, Bova takes on a lotof responsibility in this second Mars book. He's trying to create acomplex story that relies equally on science, characterization, andpolitics, mixed in with a healthy dose of mystery and a dash ofthriller. As usual, Bova nails the science but fares less well--thoughby no means poorly--with his characters. He pulls off the politicswith confidence, but the thriller subplot seems forced. Finally, themysteries (there are several) all succeed reasonably well, though someare more compelling than others. The whole makes up a thoroughlyenjoyable novel both about what life might be like on an expedition toMars and what Martian life might be like. It's a better book than itspredecessor, and it can be read entirely on its own thanks to Bova'scarefully interwoven details about the back story that took place inMars. --Craig E. Engler ... Read more

Customer Reviews (50)

Worthy sequel to 'Mars'
Jamie Waterman is back and this time he is leading the second expedition to Mars.In the first book, Waterman, a geologist and half-Navajo Indian, glimpsed something that looked like artificial construction near the end of the first manned expedition to the Red Planet.Now he and a new team of astronauts and scientists are set to return to Mars to look for answers to many of the questions that remain from the first mission.The strength of this novel lies in Dr. Bova's description of the expedition, what it would take to get to and survive on Mars, what are some of the perils and challenges, and what might we find when we get there.You'll learn a little bit about the geology of Mars, how it is different than Earth, and how difficult it would be to perform even the simplest task on the surface of Mars.This might make it sounds as if this novel is a textbook - it is not.Bova mixes the background and detail smoothly with the dialogue making for an easy and enjoyable read.The primary thread of the novel, the confirmation of the purported ruins seen by Jamie in the first novel is particularly well done and compelling.Are the ruins real or where they a figment of Jamie's imagination - read the novel and find out!Some of the secondary threads are less interesting (hence the rating of only 4 stars).The primary drawback to this novel is that it is too much like 'Days of our Lives' on Mars.Too much space in the novel is wasted (in my opinion) on who has the hots for who.The petty personal and sexual intrigues are just that, petty, and not very interesting.Bova is trying to make believable, three dimensional characters, but they come across as juvenile, not complex.For any Trekkies who are reading this review, some of the dialogue in this novel reminded me of the TNG story Casino Royale!Bottom line is that this is a good, but not uniquely outstanding, sci-fi story, and if you liked 'Mars' or Bova in general, you'll like this novel.It isn't something you'll be returning to again and again though.There are also several open plot threads that presumably have been addressed in the third novel (Mars Life).Finally, in spite of what Dr. Bova says on his webpage that the Grand Tour novels can be read in any order, I'd definitely read 'Mars' before this one.

Listening makes the commute go faster.
With the Martian rovers Spirit and Opportunity driving around Mars and sending us back some thousands of pictures you have to ask yourself if a book on the first manned trips to mars makes sense. Strangely enough, even though this book is now 10 years old, the answer is yes.

To be sure there are some problems with the book that has made it outdated. But it is a lot more current than the first book in the series called simply Mars.

But all in all, I found this book to be better than the first. There aren't as many characters and thus the story is somewhat tighter with more time available to define their personalities.

These are just a couple of the interesting points about the book. Forget the forbidding, desolate pictures from Spirit and Opportunity and have a good time with this book.

This is the second book in the Mars series recorded by Stefan Rudnicki. (See also Mars and Mars Life) It is complete and unabridged, approximately 16 hours of recording on 13 compact disks. He's a great reader.

Predictable
Here's a line of dialogue in the first few pages of the story. One of the astronauts, a character named Peter "Possum" Craig, a Texan, is noting his approval of the Mars mission commander. He says this: "We're lucky to have Dr. Waterman headin' up this rodeo."
I've lived in Texas my entire 52 years, and I have never met any Texan with the nickname "Possum". Or, for that matter, "Gopher" or "Bobcat" or any other colorful animal name. Nor have I ever heard any Texan refer to a scientific expedition, or anything else -- except a rodeo -- as a "rodeo".
So this might give you an idea of the shallowness and stereotyping of Bova's characters.
Having got that off my chest, I did enjoy the story enough to finish it. If you've read the predecessor story "Mars", most things in this book will be predictable. But I like my science fiction with a healthy dose of science, and this story satisfied that requirement and was interesting enough.

Better Than the Original
It has been six years since geologist Jamie Waterman set foot on Mars for the first time.Now, he's going back again, this time as mission commander in Ben Bova's great follow-up novel.

In this installment, Jamie has been installed as mission commander.He hopes to be able to further explore the rock formation he discovered in the Tithonium Chasma on the first expedition.He's in charge of seven other members in this expedition.Included in the mission are Stacy Dezhurova, Dex Trumball, Possum Craig, Trudy Hall, Vijay Shektar, Mitsuo Fuchida, and Tomas Rodriguez.After a five-month flight from earth, the crew had finally reached their destination.Dex is the son of Darryl C. Trumball, an American billionaire who has put up most of the funding for the mission.He had hoped that his son would be named mission commander and only reluctantly accepted Jamie as commander.Dex and his father hoped to exploit possible commercial and tourist activities on Mars, while Jamie hoped to keep the planet pristine and explore its vast amounts of uncharted wilderness.

Almost immediately, tensions begin to flare between Jamie and Dex.To make matters worse, Dex and Jamie both seem romantically interested in Vijay.Despite their rivalry, Dex and Jamie begin to work together and, as the book goes on, even develop a strong friendship. Dex begins to have serious doubts about his father's grand scheme of making Mars into a tourist destination.As time goes on, he reveals more and more of his true feelings to Jamie.Jamie wants Mars preserved as is and slowly, Dex begins to believe that Jamie's course of action is best.Vijay's and Jamie's relationship deepens as well.

Studies are carried out at the Tithonium Chasma and it is discovered that Jamie's rock dwelling is indeed the remnants of an ancient civilization of Martians.Upon analysis of rock samples taken from the site, it is determined that the structure is approximately 65 million years old; the same age as the earth was when the dinosaurs were wiped out.This discovery leads the expedition members to believe that life on Mars ended at about the same time.

Problems have arisen for the expedition as well.Fuchida believes that there is a saboteur among the group.Several strange occurances have happened that cannot be explained as simple coincidence.Now, the group must watch out for further acts of sabotage.Unfortunately, another takes place, this time with devastating consequences.

Dex's father is still determined to see his dream of having Mars as a tourist destination fulfilled.So, he gets a seat on a re-supply ship destined for Mars.Mr. Trumball hopes to "claim" the part of Mars being researched as his own.That way, he can proceed with his vision.However, Jamie, with Dex's help, has decided to stake a claim for the Navajo nation in hopes of leaving Mars as is.Jamie also learns that he must remain behind after the others leave in order to enforce his claim.So, after the final act of sabotage forces the rest of the group to leave for Earth early, Jamie has decided to remain until the re-supply ship arrives to stake the claim for the Navajo nation.But, he's not alone; Vijay has decided to stay as well.

This is an excellent book.The story is well-conceived, and the development of the characters is first-rate.I've read several of Bova's books, and I've enjoyed "Mars" and "Return to Mars" the most.I hope that there will be a third installment to finish the story.This book and its predecessor are must reads for sci-fi fans.

The discovery of life on Mars!
Navajo geologist-astronaut, Jamie Waterman, blasts off to the red planet for a second time as the leader of a privately funded follow up expedition to the earth's first foray to Mars which ended on a literal cliff-hanger. the discovery of pueblo-like cliff dwellings that seemed to indicate Mars had been inhabited in the past by intelligent life.

The crew, an eclectic blend of nationalities and experts in a variety of scientific and technical fields of endeavour, direct their efforts to the completion of three distinct projects - the examination of the lichen type biology and the geology of the caldera of Olympus Mons, a volcano and the highest mountain in the solar system; the recovery of a priceless artifact from the much earlier Mars Pathfinder expeditions; and the detailed investigation of Jamie's pueblo dwellings with a view to proving once and for all whether Mars had ever been home to an intelligent species of life.

Aside from the hard sci-fi themes of the Martian environment, the research, the overwhelming dangers and difficulties of extraterrestrial exploration in a fundamentally hostile environment, "Return to Mars" also examines two other central themes - first, the almost insurmountable difficulties of the costs of big budget science and the conflicts that inevitably arise when capitalism attempts to force fundamental research into profit-oriented motives; and, second, the inherent dangers of contaminating a pristine environment such as Mars with untrammeled, loosely controlled exploration, travel, business and (gasp!) even colonization or, worse yet, tourism!

Certainly, Bova was not shy about using "Return to Mars" as a forum for espousing his own political views on the matter and, for some readers, the strength of the expression of these opinions was seen as a shortcoming in the novel. But, I felt that using Jamie, in particular, a highly educated scientist with an underlying aboriginal Navajo cultural mindset, as the fundamental mouthpiece for these opinions, the left-leaning political statements seemed to come across as heartfelt and completely natural. While some readers might disagree with some of what Jamie had to say, it seemed completely reasonable to hear him and the other scientists express these views. Their disgust and complete antipathy to the notion of tourism directed at the Martian cliff-dwellings was particularly understandable in the context in which it was presented.

Highly recommended.

Paul Weiss ... Read more