Order JUPITER here
(also reviewed)
Order MARS here
ORDER TRANSHUMAN here
Some of my fondest childhood memories involve my dad and I watching science fiction movies together, in the basement of our home. So, I love science fiction for projecting the way we live into the future and exploring the boundaries of our civilization through the prism of knowledge. It's why I have a soft spot for hard science fiction which is anchored in contemporary problems. I didn't think I would ever find a Jupiter exploration novel that would ever top Arthur C. Clarke's majectic 2010: Odyssey 2 and to be fair, Ben Bova's JUPITER doesn't, but it finds a way to both avoid the problem and be fiercely entertaining.
Grant Archer is a scientist living in the U.S in a distant future where the government is formed by a religious group called the New Morality. Since Grant is pretty good at what he does, they decide to send him on a four year ''mission'' on a space station orbiting around Jupiter, doing research on its complex satellite system. It's the New Morality's way of getting rid of another scientist on Earth and keeping eyes on a mysterious research project, but what they's really doing is trying to get in on potentially the biggest discovery in the history of mankind by sending an alienated scientist they just ripped away from his newlywed wife in order to do so.
The elephant in the room here is Arthur C. Clarke. How can you possibly write fiction about Jupiter after he so brilliantly did it. Ben Bova had a simple solution to that haunting issue: he just acknowledged it. JUPITER happens in a world where Clarke's Odyssey novels have been published and popular enough to name concepts in Jovian research. Bova also doesn't try to compete with Clark, JUPITER deliberately takes more liberties with science in order to create its own narrative paradigm. Clarke's novel was great because it was oddly plausible and Bova's is very good because it's an implausible extrapolation of the former.
Ben Bova's writing is such an idiosyncratic pleasure, it's worth the price of admission alone for some of his novels and JUPITER would be one of these. Bova willingly uses cliché in order to quickly shape his novel and get to the interesting part. It's a bit of a wink-wink joke. For example, the lead scientist and mission chief of the station is this soulful Asian botanist guy *. It's both a zany scientist and Asian people cliché. One of the overarching themes of JUPITER though is bridging the gap between science and religion, and by making this seemingly silly choice for his support cast, Bova just picked an easy to understand image that would just help moving his idea along, because a soulful, spiritual mission chief doesn't need convincing that this gap needs to be bridged.
JUPITER was my third Ben Bova novel, but it was my far my favorite. I still believe that Bova's fiction is meant for younger readers (maybe 18-26) as a gateway drug into hard science fiction, but JUPITER is universally enjoyable, even if you don't like science fiction because it really isn't all that ''hard'' per se and extrapolates from things most readers already know like all great science fiction should. I'm not sure yet if JUPITER was an accident and if it's possible to write such unique fiction on a regular basis, but it sure occupies an interesting place in the legacy of Ben Bova and in science fiction in general.
* There's always an Asian guy in a position of power in Ben Bova's novels. I have yet to figure out why.