Venus

© 2000 by Ben Bova

Like the turning of the tides, the cycles of seasons, or the rhythmic wobblings of the moon, sooner or later, inevitably, I return to my roots. I begin jonesing for some hard science fiction.

As a youngling, I got it from Asimov and Clark. Now, older and wiser, at least on paper, I get it from Crichton and, most recently, Clement. So a few weeks back, feeling that recurring urge, I plucked Venus by Ben Bova off the shelf and burned through it in four days.

A more magnified prelude, however, is required.

I first came across Bova late in my reading life (though I knew the name from the anthologies that speckled the SF wall in my childhood library). Sometime in the mid-90s I read his Mars. I enjoyed it, overall, but there were bits and pieces that nagged at me, little things that bugged me, stuff that made the whole read a chore instead of a pleasure. When I say I “enjoyed” it, I mean, it was a good novel, and had many good payoffs, especially from a hard science fiction angle. But the literary aspect, particularly the characters, made me want to hold a grudge against what could have been a great instead of a good book.

Well, I held that grudge for almost twenty years. Until Venus.

These books are part of Bova’s “Grand Tour” series. Each book has some aspect with the exploration or colonization of the solar system. Began sometime in the mid-80s, he’s still going strong over 25 years later. I find this premise intriguing. Ever since fourth grade I wondered tremendously about those other eight planets that circle the Sun.

The story takes place a little less than a century hence. Society more advanced than what I expected (space travel is the norm, rather than the exception it is today, and was with his novel Mars). There’s not much to summarize since it’s pretty straightforward, and therein lies one of its strengths. The plot’s fired quickly off like a pinball machine. The unwanted son of a business tycoon has to put together a mission to retrieve his dead brother’s remains from the hellish surface of Venus and win ten billion of dad’s dollars – or be cut off completely. There’s dad’s business rival out to beat the unwanted son. There are crew members with mixed motivations. And in the journey to that dead brother’s body everything goes wrong.

This is where Bova excels – the hard science and the pressure situation. You’ll learn a lot about Venus (at least our current understanding of the sister world, c. 2000), and whenever the author throws something speculative in, well, you can rest assured that that will become a plot point to add to the dramatic tension down the road. And the novel overflows with dramatic tension. No one is safe – characters you’d bet you’d be reading about in the final chapter die gruesome Venusian deaths. There’s at least an even dozen twists and turns, most of which you’ll never see coming, though to be honest, I chastise myself for not spotting them pages before they pounced upon me. But, man, do those cliffhangers keep those pages turning.

His Achilles heel, at least to my line of thinking, are the characters. I don’t like them, not in Mars and especially not in Venus. The main antagonist, the billionaire dad, was cartoonishly mustache-twirlingly evil. The protagonist was so wimpy and milque-toast-ish as to be completely unappealing, even after his predictable growth of character towards the novel’s end. Women with way too much testosterone. Yet while not likeable and mainly two-dimensional, they are still somehow a hundred percent believable. Perhaps it’s a function of the pressure cookers Bova relentlessly chucks them into that generates the sympathy I found for these people.

Another pebble in my shoe is the liberal tone of the novel: man-made global warning a given, common sense politics are those of the Green Party, just to name the two biggest offenders to stick with me.

Anyway, the bottom line is that the man writes convincing, engaging, suspenseful hard science fiction. And that washes away any nitpicking I can do with characters or background ideas.

Grade: A-minus.

I bought Bova’s 1972 non-Grand Tour novel, As on a Darkling Plain, and I might pick up Jupiter, Saturn, Titan, or Mercury, whichever the gods throw first in my path.