DWD's Reviews

Read by Dean Sluyter Duration: 10 hours, 46 minutes Published by Blackstone Audio in 2013 Unabridged Sci-fi legend Ben Bova’s 1982 book Test of Fire is a look at a near-future Earth struck by a giant solar flare that literally destroys all life in Europe, Asia and Africa because that half of the planet that was facing the sun at the time. North America is partially devastated by a limited strike of nuclear missiles from Soviet Union. Central America and South America do not figure in the story. The near future Earth has a lunar base (for mining) and a fleet of space shuttles that regularly take off and land on earth from very long runways. The lunar base survived the solar flare unscathed but faces the difficult challenge of how to provide for all of its needs with little or no support from Earth. The lunar base is led by a council and that council is led by Daniel Morgan and his scheming wife. Morgan leads an expedition to Cape Canaveral for supplies and to look for surviv...

Published by Audio Literature in 2002 Duration: 3 hours, 24 minutes Performed by Harlan Ellison City of Darkness is my first foray into Ben Bova's work. I've seen his stuff around but never quite picked any of his books up. If this is typical of the quality of his work, I will be back for more. The story is set in a future United States in which the cities have been closed. New York City is cut off from the rest of the country except for the summer months - where it becomes a tourist destination away from the unrelenting tedium of suburbia (called "the tracts"). Our protagonist runs away to the city and gets locked in after it is closed at the end of the summer - and he finds out that the city is not empty after all... Harlan Ellison makes this audiobook seem like a one man radio play. He does a first-rate job at making the story sing and zing. Take the word of a listener who has heard more than his share of mediocre readers - Ellison deserves a...

Read by Cassandra Campbell, Gabrielle de Cuir, Samantha Eggar, Rosalyn Landor, Stefan Rudnicki and Judy Young Published by Blackstone Audio - 2011. 15 hours, 30 minutes Long-time author Ben Bova adds to his Grand Tour series as he continues his tales of the colonization of our solar system with Leviathans of Jupiter , the sequel to his 2001 novel Jupiter . Some characters are brought forward from his other novels but, in reality, Leviathans of Jupiter also works well as a stand-alone work. In Jupiter Bova introduced Grant Archer, a researcher that made fleeting contact with gigantic creatures (some are several kilometers wide) that live extremely deep in the oceans of Jupiter. Now, 20 years later, Archer is in charge of Jupiter’s research station and he is determined to prove that those Leviathans are intelligent. He assembles a team of experts and the book follows those experts as they get to know one another and as they determine how they can best meet and interac...