Moonrise by Ben Bova - Book Report #220

The thing I like about Bova's books are how the exploration and settlement of space are done by private companies.  Governments are usually a hinderance.

Masterson Aerospace is a conglomerate that builds clipper ships, vessels that can launch from earth to orbit and go beyond to the moon.  They also work on nanotechnology, build wall screens and run a moon base.  All of these things take money to run.  Some parts of the business are more profitable than others and some are hindered by world governments.

The novels centers itself on the precarious existence of Moonbase and its uncertain future.  Should the company close it or double down?  The conflict comes from the cold equations of the P&L sheet and the loftier goal of improving the future for humanity.

There are good guys and bad guys and Bova is not scared to kill anybody.  My only complaint, and this spans most of what I've read of his, is that his bad guys tend to be insane in some way.  I would find it much more compelling if the big drama came from a perfectly sane person working for his own interests.  Instead we get a bad guy with mommy issues who should have been in prison in the first part of the book.  Instead Bova keeps him around in a barely plausible way.

I've said this before; Bova comes from the pulp era of SF and I love that about him, it makes the stories super easy to get into.  But it makes his villains so cartoonish that the tension becomes cliché.

But, did the book do its job?  Was it entertaining?  Did I have a good time?  Did it make me wish for a future with spaceflight being as common as air travel?

Yes on all counts.  Which is why I read Bova.  He can still make you think about a future that should have happened if the Apollo program was not abandoned.

And for that reason, I believe he should be read.

If you find it in a second-hand bookstore, it's worth the five bucks to buy it.

Ben Bova

Spirey and the Queen by Alastair Reynolds

I really don't know about this one.

Part of it was interesting in how war is fought in space but then there was this existential exploration of machines developing sentience.

I don't know it's as if Reynolds did not know what to do with this story and it tried to be two things at once.

Who knows.  Maybe it's brilliant.  Maybe I am not.

Alastair Reynolds website - http://www.alastairreynolds.com/

Alastair Reynolds

Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson - Book Report #158

10/15/2016

Oh my god.  What a terrible book.  This has got to be the worst thing I have slogged through in years.

Robinson continues his exploration of a plot-less, meandering, point-less, navel-gazing, landscape-describing, list making and thesaurus using non-story of what should have been a compelling tale of humans moving beyond Earth.

The amount of time he spent re-exploring places he had described previously was stunning.  As a matter of fact, after his endless descriptions of the place, I don't want to go.  He bored me to death with his endless descriptions of sand, the colour of the sky and the kinds of snow on the surface.  This would go on for ever without once MOVING THE PLOT FORWARD.

Why is this trilogy so highly regarded?

Sure Robinson is an incredibly smart guy.  He has incredible depth of knowledge of humanities, science, engineering, geology, biology, chemistry and orbital mechanics but he can't tell a story in an interesting way.

He has managed to write over 1,500 pages of "story" that could have easily filled 400 and been far more interesting.

Each book simply gets worse in the telling and I cannot recommend the series.

Sorry, Mr. Robinson.

Firestar by Michael Flynn - Book Report #156

Audio book cover

08/15/2016

I read this book a long time ago, see book report #52

It has been over three years since I read the first installment in the Firestar series.  I thought it would be a good idea to relive that book in audio form with the intention of listening to the entire series.

After reading my original thoughts on the book I am looking forward to my enjoyment of it now.  In the intervening years Elon Musk and SpaceX have made great strides in the expansion of commercial access to space so it will be interesting to compare how close his path has come to the this particular story.

It was a 30+ hour investment in listening to the book.  My goodness was it good.  I would call it literary science fiction.  It really was grounded in the here and now.  It had all the frustrations of naysayers, political influence, financial realities, personal and professional rivalries.

It really is a massive subject if you want to try to capture almost every aspect of pushing humanity off the face of the earth.  It is made more challenging by making it a private effort which adds the governmental challenges that can be encountered.

I found the characters believable and well rounded.  Some were frustratingly stubborn, just like real people.

What struck me was how the endeavor becomes exponentially more complex as you move forward.

This feels like an important book to read if you are interested in today's space program.  Much like the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson it deals with the known realities of the day.  In this book Flynn does not push the technological speculation very far beyond what was know and proven.  He took results from NASA's X-plane program and pushed them into production instead of the reality of cancelled programs.  Which is much like the environment of today's commercial space efforts who are mining the past efforts of NASA and turning them into private companies.

It's all very exciting.

Paperback cover

Michael Flynn

Book Report #52 - Firestar by Michael Flynn

This book was first published in 1996, set mostly in the opening years of the 21st century, it suffered a bit from being dated. Some of the technology that we take for granted today was absent from the book. That kind of thing is never a deal-breaker in fiction; it was just something I noticed.

There is a lot of very good reviews of the book on the Amazon website and ill direct you there:

Amazon.ca reviews

For my part I found the book a bit disappointing only in that it lacked in the gee-wiz technology factor. This book was firmly locked in the "here and now" of technology. I guess I was hoping to see more advancement in space commerce than was shown in the book.

You have to remember that I was born in the mid-60's and grew up with the Apollo program, so I come at this topic with great sadness at the opportunities lost in my lifetime. And that's the hook of the book, our main character Mariesa van Huyten is a captain of industry who nearly single-handily takes on the project of getting humanity back into space, permanently.

Flynn turned over every rock imaginable in such a project. I thought it would be a simple book centring around the engineering of it and that there would be some kind of adventure thrown in that would justify the whole endeavor.

What I got was a book that neatly walks the line between science fiction and literary fiction. There is political interference, corporate spying, social impact, emotional drama, family conflict, betrayals, perseverance and some technological speculation.

It was a very thoughtful, insightful and thorough book. It was, for me, a challenge to get through; it came in at 885 pages and is only the first book in a series of four. (Thank God each succeeding book gets shorter!) Anybody who reads this blog knows I have a 350 page theoretical limit to novels. It took some effort, on my part, to keep picking it up but, once I was about, oddly enough, 350 pages in, I found the rhythm of it and found myself reading at every opportunity.

I loved the book, in the end, and I look forward to the second volume; Rogue Star.