Tales of the Grand Tour

From Publishers Weekly
Six-time Hugo Award winner Bova likes to tell big stories in a small way. This approach both helps and hurts in this collection of stories, excerpts and outtakes from his "Grand Tour" novels (Saturn, etc.), which explore the colonization of the solar system. Despite his vast subject, Bova focuses tightly on the heroes and villains whose striving makes up his future history. While some characters are standards of the SF genre (megalomaniac capitalist, lone-wolf entrepreneur, love object caught between them), Bova imbues each with Homeric virtues and flaws. Plus, he can slip convention to present a tale of a crippled circus performer regaining his balance from a visit to the lower-gravity moon ("The Man Who Hated Gravity"), or an account of unrequited love of a stunt double about to free-fall through Venus's skies ("High Jump"). Like a folksy astrophysicist, Bova delights in talking about outer space, from the surface of Venus (hot enough to melt aluminum!) through the asteroid belt (four times farther from the sun than Earth!) to the depths of Jupiter (a beach ball squashed down by an invisible child!). His excitement at being there matches his gusto for the dirty deeds done in the name of love, honor and duty. Less happily, the volume reveals his occasional repetitive prose, hidden across the novels. Similarly, the differing backstories of the novels sit uneasily next to each other. Still, his stories offer glimpses of the human side of space, the heroic grins and tragic grimaces alike. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From Booklist
Though some of these stories remain freestanding, Bova expanded or inserted many into the novels of his Grand Tour series, concerned with credible space exploration. The collection opener, "Sam and the Flying Dutchman," presents Sam Gunn, Bova's vision of the first space entrepreneur, getting involved in classic noir style with a beautiful woman requesting his help. Elsewhere, Bova shares legends like that of Harry Twelvetoes, who worked on a space-habitat construction crew, and tells the story of the first man to walk on the lowlands of Venus --as a daredevil's stunt double. Several stories are about astronaut Jamie Waterman: "Muzhestvo" picks up on him just before he is chosen for the first Mars mission; another has him encountering the dangers of the second Mars mission. The collection closes, in "Leviathan," with the first discovery, deep in the oceans of Jupiter, of evidence of humans by one of the giant beings native to those seas. Bova's tales encompass good characters, high-tension adventure, thoughtful introspection, and a sense of wonder. Regina Schroeder
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Book Description
In novels like Mars and Moonbase, and Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn, as well as Privateers, The Precipice, and The Rock Rats, Ben Bova has been telling the stories of the wars and rivalries, the outsize individuals, public crusades, and private passions that will drive us as we expand into the Solar System and make use of its vast resources. And throughout, Bova has shown our cosmic neighborhood as we know it to be, giving us a sense of Venus and Jupiter and the Asteroid Belt and Mars that's as up-to-date as the latest observations. For the last two decades have been a golden age of near-Earth astronomy and observation, and in his novels Bova has made dramatic use of our newest knowledge.

But during that time Bova has also written short fiction about some of the same events and characters---Sam Gunn, Martin Humphries, Klaus Fuchs, Dan Randolph, the Asteroid Wars. Now, in Tales of the Grand Tour, those stories are collected in book form for the first time, creating a volume that is a landmark of modern SF.



About the Author
Born in Philadelphia, Ben Bova worked as a newspaper reporter, a technical editor for Project Vanguard (the first American satellite program), and a science writer and marketing manager for Avco Everett Research Laboratory, before being appointed editor of Analog, one of the leading science fiction magazines, in 1971. After leaving Analog in 1978, he continued his editorial work in science fiction, serving as fiction editor of Omni for several years and editing a number of anthologies and lines of books, including the "Ben Bova Presents" series for Tor. He has won science fiction's Hugo Award for Best Editor six times.

A published SF author from the late 1950s onward, Bova is one of the field's leading writers of "hard SF," science fiction based on plausible science and engineering. Among his dozens of novels are Millennium, The Kinsman Saga, Colony, Orion, Peacekeepers, Privateers, and the Voyagers series. Much of his recent work, including Mars, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, The Precipice, and The Rock Rats, falls into the continuity he calls "The Grand Tour," a large-scale saga of the near-future exploration and development of our solar system.

A President Emeritus of the National Space Society and a past president of Science-fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, in 2001 Dr. Bova was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He lives in Naples, Florida, with his wife, the well-known literary agent Barbara Bova.



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Bova's impressive ten-book (so far) cycle of novels about the exploration of the solar system is known as the Grand Tour; these 12 tales are set in, and expand, that theme-well, kind of. One yarn has crept in from another series, the Kinsman saga, but at least it's set on the Moon. Another, a near-fatal encounter with the pirate outcast agonistes of the asteroid belt, Lars Fuchs, more properly belongs with the Sam Gunn story sequence. "Muzhestvo" began life as a story and later was incorporated into the novel Mars (1992). "Red Sky at Morning" and "Leviathan" are excerpted from Return to Mars (1999) and Jupiter (2001) respectively. "Death on Venus" strongly resembles a synoptic version of the novel Venus (2000). Redemption is the theme of most of the remainder: a drunken, aimless Navaho construction worker finds fulfillment working in space; global warming leads to the collapse of civilization on Earth; a jealous stuntman survives a trek across the hellish landscape of Venus; an embittered, crippled trapeze artiste finds new inspiration under the Moon's low gravity; and a virtual-reality broadcast of the first Mars landing changes several lives for the better. Finally, "Sepulcher," wherein an alien artifact exerts its remarkable effect on megalomaniac and series bad-hat Martin Humphries, is too short: look for it to become the basis for a novel in its own right. Bova's saga is a long, varied, and successful one, and this is a good place for newbies to start. Readers already familiar with the series, however, will find maybe half a book's worth of fresh material.


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