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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...