Book Review: As on a Darkling Plain

 

© 1972 by Ben Bova

 

A few weeks ago Ben Bova, longtime science fiction editor, anthologist, and pulp writer, died at the satisfying age of 88. Over the course of a lengthy fifty-year literary career, he’s written something like 125 novels. The most famous series of his is called the Grand Tour series, where each major object in the Solar System was the subject or setting of one of his novels. I read two of those 25-plus books.

Anyway, upon hearing of his death back around Thanksgiving, I scanned my On-Deck bookshelf (nearly a hundred items stacked haphazardly there) and came across As on a Darkling Plain. The poor but enticing 270-page paperback had been sitting there for over eight years. Now was an excuse to read it.

It’s not that I am unfamiliar with Bova. I first ran across him in the early 90s, reading a couple of his stories in a book designed to help aspiring writers: “Sepulchre,” “Crisis of the Month,” and “The Shining Ones.” I was impressed by all three and put his name on the Acquisitions List. My first entry into the Grand Tour soon followed, Mars. Then other topics and other authors intervened. A decade passed until I came across my second journey of the Grand Tour, the near-perfect Venus. Last year I put away Farside, and this past Covid-summer I read the bombastically-titled Death Wave.

There are several things I note about a Bovan novel, aside from the subjective evaluation that the more books of his I read, the less I enjoyed them. Which is not to say I won’t further read more in my leisure (in fact, I am still on the lookout for more “Grand Tour” novels, particularly those revolving about the outer gas giants of the Solar System). I will. But I think I have Bova pegged as an unabashed product of the Seventies. Again, which is not necessarily a bad thing. I matured literary-wise on the bones of 70s SF.

The first thing about a Bova novel is that the science is competent. It won’t be as hard SF as, say, a Hal Clement novel or, more to be more contemporary, a Neal Stephenson or Cixin Liu. My best gauge is that a Bova will be about a notch below something Michael Crichton would write. Which is, again, not a bad thing. I enjoy my SF grounded in as much S as F. Maybe more so, coming from my background in physics.

The next major thing about a Bova novel is, and there’s really no way to politely put it, the fact that every character behaves as if he or she was starring in General Hospital or One Life to Live. Yes, a soap opera. You have super-intelligent men and women, the tops in their fields, pioneers on new worlds, unraveling the mysteries of deep space – and all the while trying to get into each other’s pants and flailing around in jealous rages to put any High School class to shame.

It makes for a weird mixture. Sometimes, as in Mars and Venus, it works. Other times, like Farside and Death Wave, it doesn’t. In this book, As on a Darkling Plain, the soapy elements did not interfere with my enjoyment of the tale, because, well, at its heart was a neat little mystery.

A century or so in the future huge, featureless, obsidian towers are discovered on Titan, the large moon of Saturn. Simply called “machines,” because they are apparently doing something, although they remain impenetrable, their purpose – and more importantly, who built them – remains a mystery. Decades pass, and scientists spend lifetimes studying them to no avail. One is our hero, Dr. Sidney Lee, who, at novel’s beginning, nearly commits suicide on the frozen lakes of Titan, and is sent back to Earth.

Still, he’s the leading authority on the machines, so he’s brought back for a new mission – this time to a planet orbiting the stars of Sirius. Along with the beautiful Dr. Marlene Ettinger. And because there’s a soap opera going on here, Dr. Bob O’Banion, the third wheel, is sent to Jupiter. Why Sirius and why Jupiter? To pursue leads as to what built the machines. Cloud whales of Jupiter, or – get this – Neanderthals on a terrestrial planet orbiting Sirius. Neanderthals? Yes, our humanoid ancestors. Why they’re there is the gist of the novel’s twist.

Turns out Darkling Plain is the beginning of another series of novels of Bova’s, called The Others. And it further turns out that the Others are an alien race who visited our system millennia ago, and that the machines – SPOILER ALERT! – are actually a warning device, a gun aimed at the Sun, Damocles-like, to keep us, mankind, in line. Who these Others are and why they visited us and why they left the machines to watch over us, well, you’ll have to read the rest of the series.

I am omitting the cleverest, most shocking twist of all that comes at the novel’s final pages, a very satisfying twist to the entire mystery, one that I don’t think I ever quite read before. Though after a couple days I’m not sure how Dr. Lee arrived at this conclusion other than stretching some sparse clues. In any event, I don’t think I’ll spoil that here, even for a novel nearly fifty years old.

Verdict: An enjoyable quick SF read. Grade: B-plus.