Well developed characters have never been Bova's strong suit. But he makes up for it with his extremely competent mainstream sci fi themes, and solid grounding of his science in current knowledge.. I liked the Leviathans - massive creatures who in some ways resemble the microscopic Volvox of ea...
I really want to like this follow-up to "Farside." I really wanted it to be an improvement in terms of storytelling, character development, and style. Unfortunately, aside from a few bright spots, it wasn't. Same flat characters, same flat dialogue. It reads like the first draft of a script of th...
I like techno thrillers and ones with aircraft. My first job was programming avionics and weapon systems. I love this type of book especially Dale Brown's Flight of the Old Dog. In both are teams that are forced to take on a mission into a foreign country (North Korea in Able One) when they sh...
While some readers didn't like this book, I enjoyed it. The story is about a cellular biologist who is trying to save his granddaughter from dying from cancer. The doctor has a radical new treatment that manipulates parts of cells related to aging, known as Telomeres. His experiments have show...
This book retells the story of the Trojan War, with the title character, The Hittite Lukka, being involved by fighting as part of the forces of Odysseus. Lukka has a group of 20 Hittite soldiers under his command that have stayed together after their home kingdom is destroyed. Lukka finds out his...
One of the blessings/curses of working in a mall is the convenience of a nearby bookstore. The blessing is that I love books… perusing them, sampling them, browsing, and ultimately buying them. The only problem is that I’ve spent probably a decade buying books I never have time to read. I finally...
This book carries on where Saturn ends. The 11 mile long by 4 mile wide space habitat Goddard has reached Saturn and is in orbit around it’s moon Titan.Science, politics, technology and human foibles all get put in a bender, shaken; not stirred, and what comes out is highly entertaining.The main ...
This book is "hard science fiction" meaning that it consistently abides by real world physics, though it does present those ideas in a speculative way. Bova does a good job presenting those concepts, though he does occasionally go into "info dump" mode in a way that reads as a little obvious.As ...
Like many short story collections, this is a mix of quality. It ranges from the "rather good" at the high end to the "rather mediocre" at the low end -- or, in the rating parlance of the goodreads star system, from "really liked it" to "it was ok", because nothing in it was so bad as to deserve ...
This book is horrifying from the very beginning, in the exact same sense that Lost Boys is horrifying. You know something bad will happen to a child and you, as a reader, are powerless to prevent it. You can only watch with mounting dread as events move closer and closer to their appointed end.Al...
Winds of Altair is my second venture into the works of acclaimed sci-fi writer Ben Bova. I have heard from a few sources that it heavily inspired Avatar, so I was willing to take an 8-hour shot at it. Afterwards, I felt disappointed at the wasted potential, but do give credit to the story for ins...
A million years ago, our ancestors reached into space - and met a powerful alien race that smashed them back into the Stone Age. Now mankind has again began building a star empire - but this time with the certain knowledge that, somwhere, those Others still exist, waiting. But not all of the plan...
I'll give this four stars. An interesting book, and a bit of an orphan when it comes to Bova's Grand Tour. Written in the 1980's and published in 1985 during the height of the cold war the book depicts a world in which the Soviet Union won the Cold War forcing the nations of earth to abandon th...
Ben Bova wrote the Orion series to explore one big idea: what is our relationship to god or to the gods? Does humanity create the gods or do the gods create humanity? What if the relationship is circular and more messy than you think? Orion was created by the Creators, to fight their battles in t...
Orion narrates his sudden awakening as a slave. He lays seige to Troy with Odysseus, brings down the walls of Jericho, and raises rightful Prince Aramset to power of Pharoah in Egypt. But the Greek "gods" are only powerful future humans: Apollo his master, Athena his beloved. The enlivening of lo...
After conquering everything else, the last frontier was... controlling Mother Nature! THE WEATHERMAKERS is a novel about climate change--literally. By the award-winning hard SF author of the THE EXILES TRILOGY, the Watchmen series, and the Grand Tour series. Excerpt: "I want an explanation of wha...
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:SATURNEarth groans under the thumb of fundamentalist political regimes. Crisis after crisis has given aut...
This part of the story seems to be an author afterthought. Only a few characters from the previous three books make an appearance in this book. The rest of the plot revolves around a prospector family who are attacked shortly after the habitat at Ceres is destroyed. In an effort to deflect the ma...
Dan Randolph never plays by the rules. A hell-raising maverick with no patience for fools, he is admired by his friends, feared by his enemies, and desired by the world's loveliest women. Acting as a twenty-first privateer, Randolph broke the political strangle-hold on space exploration, and beca...
I love how Moonrise starts out. Paul Stavenger is stranded on the moon with nothing but the spacesuit he’s wearing. He’s miles from the nearest base and has only his own two feet to get him there. His strength, not to mention his air supply, is limited. How did he get into this terrifying p...
THE IRREPRESSIBLE SAM GUNN A hero without peer or scruples, Sam Gunn has a nose for trouble, money, and women--though not necessarily in that order. A man with the ego (and stature) of a Napoleon, the business acumen of a P. T. Barnum, and the raging hormones of a teenage boy, Sam is the fines...
Two hundred thousand feet up, things go horribly wrong. An experimental low-orbit spaceplane breaks up on reentry, falling to earth over a trail hundreds of miles long. And it its wake is the beginning of the most important mission in the history of space. America needs energy, and Dan Randolph ...
This is the second of Ben Bova’s ‘Grand Tour of the Solar System’ series that I’ve read. The other one was ‘Jupiter’ and I think this one is better. This is definitely a story about people.It is about how Saito Yamagata, business tycoon, achieves his dream even as he fails his life; about who Dan...
Ok, first of all, it's way too early for me to be trying to write a book review but, since I finished this at stupid-o'clock last night, I want to get my thoughts out while it's still fresh in my head. I picked this book up in the DOLLAR STORE of all places and paid a whoppin' $1.25 for it. I tho...
“Dad will kill you if he finds out.”Alexander Humphries led the first manned expedition to Venus, and became among the first to die there. It was an unexplained equipment malfunction that doomed Alex’s ship and crew to rest on the toxic surface of Earth’s twin forever. In the two years since, t...
Ben Bova is an award winning science fiction author, has been on the editorial staff of Analog and Omni, and has written a ton of books. I thought it was about time I read some of his work. Voyagers, first published in 1981 and now available as an ebook, was the first one I found. The book rat...
This is just one of those light bits of fluff that I enjoy while I'm reading something heavier. It's not art, but it's fun. It's part of a series that Bova created in which our hero, Orion, is placed in Macedonia during Philip II's reign, and as Philip's son Alexander (eventually known as "the Gr...
I read this book without reading the first two in the series. Not knowing the early history of Keith Stoner didn't matter too much with this volume. I don't really have a desire to read space sci-fi but the story in this volume wasn't too bad. Keith who has been out of the scene for several ye...
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 U.S.-Soviet mission to capture an alien ship. The Soviets had to pull out, but Stoner persisted, and while on the strange ship, he fell int...
This has been sitting on my shelf for a while and I finally got around to it. Unbeknownst to me, this is actually a collection of short stories and editorials that Bova compiled sometime in the 80s, making the opinion pieces a bit dated. Rather than detract from the work, however, the age of the ...
Provocative, gripping, startling: bestselling author Ben Bova delivers a knockout read with his trademark blend of cutting edge science and unrelenting suspense…. Some see stem-cell research as mankind’s greatest scientific breakthrough. Others see a blasphemous attempt to play God. Suddenly, th...
Imagine that you were a scientist exploring Mars and you discovered the ruins of an extinct civilization. Then imagine that you discovered unrefutable fossils. This would cause quite a sensation back on Earth, wouldn't it? Don't count on it if right-wing religionists are in power. Imagine that yo...
How might the world have changed if the incidents in this story had actually happened in the 1970s? As more than one character has said in more than one story, “It just might work!” * * * To: The President of the United States The White House From: Rev. Joshua Folsom Associate Director (pro tem.)...
Lapin: Hello, this is Lapin. Mobile Phone: (Sounds of street traffic in background) Yes, I can hear you. Lapin: The trial adjourned for the day, just five minutes ago. Mobile: Justice only works a short day, eh? Lapin: It will resume tomorrow at ten o'clock. Mobile: Okay, okay. So how did it go t...
All the previous day they had taken turns driving the rover at breakneck speed along the broken, rugged badlands country, heading north by east, away from the faulted canyons of Noctis Labyrinthus, away from their base camp. Breakneck speed, for the rover, was not quite forty kilometers per hour—...
asked Taki Nomura.Ted Connover was sitting in the only visitor’s chair, at one end of Nomura’s minuscule desk. The infirmary was pocket-sized: not even one bed. If anyone got sick or was injured, they’d be placed in their own privacy cubicle.Ted’s eyes flicked to the unblinking red light of the r...
It glowed a brilliant orange, matching the dying glow of Pallatin's K-2 star. With the sky not yet dark, it looked as though there were two suns in the sky: a brighter, sinking one in the west; another, seemingly only slightly dimmer, climbing the eastern sky. He smiled, remembering the children'...
Frankenheimer down a long corridor. She saw that the doors on either side were unmarked, and the corridor ended in a double door, also unmarked. Castiglione was wearing a fitted military-style tunic, complete with epaulettes. Frankenheimer was in ordinary street clothes: a collarless tan checkere...
—NOAM CHOMSKY THE DISCOVERER NOT MANY MEN choose their honeymoon site for its clear night skies, nor do they leave their beds in the predawn hours to climb up to the roof of their rented cottage. At least Hal Jacobs’s bride understood his strange passion. Linda Krauss-Jacobs, like her husband, wa...
He phoned Glynis every day, getting her answering machine most of the time. When she did speak to him, it was brief and cool. “No, I haven’t gone up to Vernon,” she said, her voice steady, steely. “I’m calling the hotels and boarding houses, trying to find out if Perez is staying in one of them.”...
He did not think he could be more frightened than he already was, but Paulino tensed at the words so hard that he felt his teeth grinding together painfully. There was an emergency tank of oxygen on the tractor, of course, but at best that held another two hours of breathable oxy and he had been ...
CARL SAGAN Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record Random House 1978 CHAPTER 25 Stoner paced back and forth across the hot, stuffy control center, threading his way around the jumble of chairs and standing men and women. A dozen technicians sat at their humming electronics consoles, hea...
The wild joy of his reception at the airlock had been completely unexpected. For more than two weeks he had shouldered the responsibilities of the leader of an expedition into hell. He had seen more of death than any man wanted to see, had forced himself to accept it, to d...
To her, the frozen astronaut was more than a news story, more than a company project. It was a personal quest. She had been born twenty-eight years earlier in a refugee camp in Thailand, a few miles from the border of Kampuchea, where Vietnamese troops and hard-eyed Commun...
Martin Arnold looked shocked. “That’s crazy.” Sarko leaned back in his chair and watched his assistant. “What’s crazy about it?” he asked. Arnold had just come in to work. He took off his jacket and hung it on the hook behind...
Rodriguez sat at the console with his bandaged hand tied against his chest by a sling. Stacy Dezhurova sat beside him. No one made a sound, not even a breath, as they stared at the main display screen. “We’ve got to get back up to the rover now,” Jamie was saying, his voic...
My mind was in turmoil. Too much had happened too quickly. If I was going to be a murderer's target, okay, there wasn't much I could do about it. But no need to set her up as the next clay pigeon. Besides, it would be too easy to get damned romantic about the danger of it all, and start acting li...
Trudy’s voice said in Grant’s helmet speakers, “now plug in the connector cord from the backup computer.…” Grant was standing on the spider-work platform built halfway up the telescope, where its secondary mirror had been placed. It was dark inside the hundred-meter-wide tube, and he was glad tha...
Competition THE committee seemed impressed by Ted’s speech, and several of the men promised to look into our drought-alleviation idea. But the following Monday morning, back at Aeolus, Ted was gloomy. “Same old story,” he grumbled. “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.” &n...
This pair of stories sheds some possible light on why a certain former President of the United States, and a certain former Secretary of State, behaved the way they did at critical junctures in their respective lives. He stood at his bedroom window, gazing happily out at...
Alexander," said Red Eagle. Cole Alexander shrugged at the massive Amerind. "The plane? It's my home now. A houseboat with wings. Subsonic, but fast enough to suit me." "It apparently caused quite a stir when you landed on the lake." "Hide in plain sight," Alexander said. ...
I was lying on the hard wet planks of the deck of a ship that was heaving up and down sickeningly. I smelled the salt tang of the sea and the stench of vomit and human sweat. Our little cockleshell bobbed in the choppy waters of the Channel so hard that we were all soaked to the skin from the spr...