TEST of FIRE (audiobook) by Ben Bova

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 survivors. He returns with both but is struck by the pitiful condition of the people he left behind. Civilization has all but ended for them and he wants to make sure that thousands of years of art, philosophy and science are not lost. He wants to work with the people on Earth but is overruled by the council due to the behind the scenes machinations of his wife. They want to write off the Earth and focus on keeping the lunar base alive.

While Morgan’s wife schemes and sleeps with powerful members of the council to get her way and betray her husband, Morgan decides to return to Earth on a mission to retrieve fissionable fuel to power the base’s nuclear plants (the moon lacks those elements). Morgan retrieves the fuel and refuses to return to the moon, even though his wife is pregnant. He is considered a traitor and for twenty years his son, Alec, is taught that his father betrayed the base.

Photo by Gregory H. Revera

Alec is trained to lead a mission to Earth to retrieve the fuel and to get even with his father who is believed to have set up a kingdom among the “barbarians,” as the survivors are called.  Alec brings superior technology, including laser cannons, but far inferior numbers, including a member of the council who may want to kill him and marry his mother. Even though the earth soldiers are at a disadvantage when it comes to weapons, they have the advantage when it comes earth’s gravity, heat, humidity and viruses.

While this book is based on a tremendous premise and is filled with characters that feel as though they belong in a Greek or even a Shakespearean tragedy, it never lives up to its promise, which is odd considering that the book is basically a revision of a book he wrote in the early 1970s called When the Sky Burned, making this the second draft of the same story. Despite the revision, too many characters, such as Alec’s mother (who dominates the first half of the book), just disappear from the story as it goes along. Also, very few of the characters are even likable. Daniel Morgan is presumed honorable, but he is inscrutable. His wife is plain evil. At first Alec is a sympathetic character, but early on in the book he rapes a female doctor while on a dinner date in her apartment. Personally, I found it hard to root for rapists. In the end, I just listened to see how Bova was going to end the book all the while wondering what David Weber would have done with it.

Dean Sluyter’s reading of Test of Fire certainly did not help my enjoyment of the book. It is not that Sluyter has a poor reading voice – to the contrary, he has excellent diction and a nice deep tone. But, he reads slowly and tends to get a little William Shatner-esque in long passages with odd pauses and breaks. There was not much differentiation between the male and female characters and most of the male characters sounded very similar. It may be that his reading style is better suited for non-fiction rather than fiction where listeners (at least this one listener) place a premium on a more dramatic reading performance.

Note: I received a download copy of this audiobook from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

I rate this audiobook 2 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: TEST of FIRE by Ben Bova.

Reviewed on July 24, 2013.

City of Darkness (audiobook) by Ben Bova

Originally published in 1976.

Published by Audio Literature in 2002
Duration: 3 hours, 24 minutes
Performed by Harlan Ellison.

Unabridged

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 an award.

I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5.

This audiobook can be found here on Amazon.com: City of Darkness.

Reviewed on November 13, 2006.

Leviathans of Jupiter (Grand Tour series) (audiobook) by Ben Bova

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.

Unabridged.

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 interact with an utterly alien life form that may or may not be intelligent.

Jupiter and one of its many moons

In many ways, Bova’s book is a throwback style book, which is appropriate since Bova is among the oldest living science fiction authors (born in 1932). Its style reminded me of the classic science fiction books from the Golden Age – the point of the book is nothing more than to create an old-fashioned adventure in the stars – in this case it is the wonder of meeting an alien intelligence. The technology is not the star, no long moral pontifications, no hidden meanings - just the adventure of exploration and discovery. But, it is a fun adventure and this is a fun book.

Bova also lets your brain work on a few problems as he tells the story. For example, how would you decipher an entirely new language with no shared experiences to at least start with? These aliens look nothing like us and we look nothing like them. Our lives are utterly different. How can you make any sort of meaningful communication? Luckily, for Archer and his explorers, there is a Leviathan out of the Kin (their word for a group of Leviathans) that is just as curious about the probes that Archer has been sending into Jupiter’s oceans as Archer has been about the Leviathans. The reader is treated to an inside view of Bova’s Leviathan culture and how most of the Kin is unwilling to accept anything new that upsets its idea of how all of life is balanced.

Bova tells the book from several points of view besides that of Archer and the Leviathan. There is a bit of innocent romance and several stock characters that could have been taken from any of a dozen other science fiction books. He even tries to throw in a human villain, Katherine Westfall, a member of the governing body that is supposed to oversee Archer’s research. She is determined to sabotage this research for reasons that do not quite gel. Rather than being a real threat, she becomes more of a sideshow to the real action, which is the difficulty of reaching the Leviathans and then communicating with them.

The audiobook notes on the cover that it is “read by a full cast” – and it is. There are six different readers, which thrilled me when I prepared to listen. I sincerely love the books that are read like the old-fashioned radio plays, with a different actor reading different character’s parts. However, this book has six different readers who simply take turns reading – each getting a section or a chapter and then handing it off to the next reader.

Bova delivers a fun bit of classic science fiction adventure. The possibility of more to come is hinted at as well with several bits of unresolved business left at the end of this book.

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5.

This audiobook can be found on Amazon.com here: Leviathans of Jupiter by Ben Bova.

Reviewed June on 5, 2011.