A new month begins, and the pressure to actually read as much as possible drops away. As I've been browsing my book stacks, I've come across several rather slim short story collections by Ben Bova (one of those SF authors, like Robert Silverberg, where I still have several dozen books floating around waiting to be read), as well as one further book which sounded very interesting. These collections - well, the first two I'd be reading - had some further advantages, see below.
Ben Bova - Future Crime: Ben Bova short stories #1. Something of a meta-collection, made up of stories that had already been published elsewhere. This allowed me to skip quite a large part of the book, as the by far longest tale was
City of Darkness, a book I had already read some years back in my 20 books in 1 week action. I started this book on the first of September but did not manage to finish it before going back to Spain, and then my trip was so tiring I only wrapped it up right as the bus was leaving from Malaga airport. So much for taking a total of four books with me just to be on the safe side.
Vince's Dragon: Heh, something of a fantasy story. As Bova states, probably the only story ever to deal with a Mafia dragon!
A young bravo, needing to prove himself to the Don, wants to torch a building, thereby disturbing the invisible dragon lady living within. She shows him how to
really torch a building (no evidence of accelerators, the police are really puzzled!), and soon the old Don is replaced by a new Don...
A lot of time passes, and young Vince becomes fat old Don Vince, a truly savory dragon meal...
Brillo: Written in cooperation with Harlan Ellison. A cop in the not too distant future gets extremely frustrated when he has to walk the beat with a semi-AI Robocop who adheres to the rules wayyyy too much. In parts funny but also really dark.
Brillo, cause, ya know, Metal Fuzz!
Out of Time: The Mafia again. An old, dying Don gets the idea to get himself cryogenically frozen until they can heal his body. His brutal, stupid heir, after many a year of crime, gets caught, and comes up with a plan with his lawyer: Have himself also be cryogenically frozen, which will imply he is legally dead - and all charges against him will be dropped! Not to mention by the time he is thawed, all the crimes against him will be past the statute of limitations! The lawyer later has the same idea... but gets thawed after just three years to learn that so many people have been using this trick, the government closed the loophole and now they're all going to be charged!
Test in Orbit: Next to Sam Gunn (see below), another recurring Bova character is Chet Kinsman. While Gunn is like a short Han Solo, Kinsman is more Maverick from Top Gun... Huge ego and the body to wield it. In this story, the Soviets send up some spacecraft of unknown purpose. The Americans test their capability of reacting within less than a day to such an unscheduled launch. While examining the small space station, a Soviet-piloted ship arrives too, and Kinsman is forced to kill the Cosmonaut.
For whatever reasons, the Russkies sent up a young woman, terrified to death. Kinsman does not feel like the hero his debriefers make him out to be.
Stars, Won't You Hide Me?: The far future, very compact. A last surviving member of the Human race, which has tyrannized the Universe, flees from the apocalyptic battle against The Others at near light speed. Pursued, he zips around the Universe until it finally collapses in the Big Crunch. You'll never catch me alive!
Diamond Sam: A Sam Gunn tale. Sam is one of Bova's recurring heroes, featuring in a lot of short stories that were collected in two books (Sam Gunn Forever/Unlimited). He is a short, wily NASA astronaut who can be characterized by two words: Han Solo! In this story, he "accidentally" visits a Russian space station, and starts a trade: Porno videos against ice cream spiked with orbitally grown diamonds! He sells the diamonds on the black market and sets up bank accounts for the Russians, sharing the profits.
The Russian space station is actually a laser module for "Star Wars", and the diamonds are turned into ultraresistant windows for the laser system. And while it is true the Gunn sells them, and even is totally honest about making the cosmonauts rich later, the diamonds are also analyzed by the Americans to counteract the laser system... This story was interesting as it was told from the perspective of the station commander, many years later, when he is retired in a moon-based old people's home for Heroes of the Soviet Union; at this time Sam Gunn himself is long dead. The second Gunn story I'd be reading - see below - was done in the same style, maybe all of the are?
Escape!: The second longer tale of the volume, also published as a really short standalone book of about 100 pages. A juvenile delinquent lands in an experimental prison facility where everyone is treated well, has a lot of freedom to roam around, the food is good, there's a great library, a school, workshops... The only downside: Your sentence is indefinite, we will let you out once you have become a model citizen. Oh, and escape is utterly impossible, for the prison is controlled by an AI and cameras and sensors are everywhere!
Ben Bova - Escape Plus: Ben Bova short stories #2. This was an easy read - as you may surmise from the title, the main story was Escape!, so I could already skip like 40% of the book. It also contains Vince's Dragon and Stars, Won't You Hide Me? Still, it took me several days in Spain to finish it, way too much to do.
A Slight Miscalculation: A mathematical genius derives a code to predict earthquakes. It predicts that soon, The Big One will happen - something that said genius doesn't really comprehend. He does encounter a mistake, though, between his calculations and those of the computer...
Which saves his life, as he is standing on the correct side of a parking lot when everything east of the San Andreas fault slides into the Atlantic. He must furiously admit that the computer was correct. So essentially, the whole story just lead up to the punchline of a joke.
The Last Decision: An awesome story! Gordon R. Dickson (the co-author of Gremlins Ho Home!), in his SF, has a character named The Emperor of a Hundred Worlds. Bova loved this background character and got permission to write a story focusing on him. So in this far future, Earth is a tranquil paradise, home to just a few million "baseline" humans, against which the rest of the human race monitors its genetic evolution. But now the Sun is going to explode (oh where have I heard that plotline???) and Earth will be wiped out. But a brilliant young astrophysicist has a plan To Save The Sun!! I write this as a title because, after having this "this seems familiar" thought, I figured out that Bova later, with another coauthor, wrote a complete nearly 1000-page duology (the second book being To Fear The Light) which expands this story to encompass the entire thing!! And, damn it, I have both books but of course was a few days too late to actually take them with me/put them in the big box of books (19 pounds!) which I mailed myself here...
Anyway, the Emperor actually invites this astrophysicist (Unheard of! A mere commoner from a primitive world far from the Imperial home planet!), has a long talk with her, and decides - his Last Decision, as he is old and dying (interesting: Humans have developed rejuvenation technology, but the immediate Imperial family is forbidden to use it - there are advantages to having your Emperor be mortal and "short-lived"...) - to send the entire Imperial court to live on Earth, including his ambitious son! This will guarantee that all the other worlds will fall in line to finance the project which will take centuries and eat up vast resources. So, yeah, REALLY looking forward to the two full books.
Men of Good Will: Another really short tale that is essentially a joke. A reporter wants to know why, among rising tensions between the USA and the USSR, the two moonbases of the superpowers seem to have cordial relations. Well, turns out they initially had their own spats with live ammunition, but the weak gravity of the Moon and lack of any air resistance led to all the bullets encircling the entire Moon and hitting the bases again and again... OK, this was a rather stupid idea, after all, despite lack of air resistance, hitting buildings is for sure going to stop the barrage at once...
Blood of Tyrants: An alt-universe Danny Romano, the protagonist of Escape!, who, in this case, has not been rehabilitated, plans to take over the entire city in a bloody revolution so that the youth gangs have free hand to do whichever way the please. Things don't end well...
The Next Logical Step: The US devises an extremely powerful computer system which combines mind-blowing VR capabilities with a predictive engine, creating fully immersive movies of how certain confrontation scenarios with the USSR will play out. Problem is, no matter the input, each scenario ends in nuclear holocaust and the end of civilization. What to make of this? See to it that the plans for this system are leaked to the Soviets STAT!
The Shining Ones: A kid, who is suffering from some unstated but lethal condition (it's told from his perspective and he just heard his parents talking with a doctor when they thought he was not listening), is given hope when an alien spaceship lands near his home! Similar to the movie Arrival, the ship is immediately cordoned off by the Armed Forces, who try, but fail to communicate with the aliens. The kid sneaks into the camp in hopes of getting on the ship to be healed.
He gets caught hiding, but by a linguist - yeah, really reminds me of Arrival! - who decides showing the aliens a sick child might just work. And indeed, the kid gets let into the spaceship, where he is able to communicate with the aliens. They deny him healing, but offside mention that while he was teleported into the inside, they "fixed several chemical imbalances in his body" - which is exactly what he desired! Also, the reason the aliens landed on Earth and refused to communicate with anyone is that their arrival was just a stupid navigation error and they were getting their bearings in the hyperdimensional space-time fabric...
Sword Play: A short, rather amusing totally non-SF tale based on an experience Bova had in his fencing club when younger. A total novice, who just came over to see what it's like, is invited to fight against his more experienced friend. He accidentally hurts him (comes too close, the epée bends and breaks and stabs the other guy), and while the wound doesn't look so bad, the young man mentions that he has got blood in his mouth. The fencing teacher panics (punctured lung!) and drags him to the ER, where a highly annoyed doctor complains the guy has nothing but a scratch! Turns out he was not lying, but he had just bit his tongue...
A Long Way Back: Bova's very first published SF story. Emphasis on both published and SF. Apocalypse has come to the world. A bunch of scientists manage to band together in the wasteland, scrounge a bunch of parts, and build a rocket to send a man to orbit. For up there, launched shortly before the apocalypse, are the parts of a solar power satellite which just need to be put together like LEGO. In doing so, the astronaut gives the satellite a slight acceleration, which implies it will not point its microwave beam at the receiver anymore...
This man, back on Earth, had urged the others to man an expedition into the other cities of the continental US. The leader of the scientists was opposed. They finally agreed: Dude becomes astronaut, builds satellite, gets his expedition when he comes back. But now all seems lost.
After some thought, the astronaut sacrifices himself, using the fuel meant for de-orbit to nudge the satellite back into position... nearly! The beam will actually hit a few hundred miles from where the scientists have built their fortress, forcing them out into the world and out of the stagnation they had landed themselves in. Really good story especially considering how old it is.
Ben Bova - Prometheans: Ben Bova short stories #3! This volume is a mix of SF and non-fiction stories dealing with that part of humanity Bova labels the Prometheans (in contrast to the Luddites): Those who bring the fire, stoke the fire, and generally create advancement and progress. At times through strictly scientific means, at other times, in more adventuresome ways... None of these stories showed up in the other two books.
Sam Gunn: Well, here's Sam Gunn again! The first, but also last, Sam Gunn story! Because, alas, he is dead!
Again! But while preparing his burial monument out in the vastness of Oceanus Procellarum on the Moon, an old hand tells the tale of how he was once part of the second wave of Lunar exploration, and Sam saved the life of all the astronauts after their return spacecraft had run out of battery power while sitting on the surface... by MacGyvering a still to produce non-lethal (but otherwise horrible) hard alcohol to keep everyone inebriated for a week until rescue could get there!
Also, the monument was built far from any moonbases to ensure people would be paying guides to go out beyond the horizon and see it!
Private Enterprise Goes Into Orbit: An article actually published in the in-flight magazine of Continental Airlines in the hopes of businesspeople reading it... From 1983, and highly optimistic at the time, predicting orbital hotels by 1999 or a fifth space shuttle for purely commercial flights. I looked up some of the companies mentioned, one pretty much failed and now offers "star naming services and space burials" and one I was unable to find at all...
Vision: Frustrated at having a talk show hogged by an UFOlogist and a mystic, a NASA engineer blurts out on TV that you can live forever in orbit. After that, there's no way back, congress funds its own geriatric retirement home up there.
Meteorites: Well, just that, an article on the things.
Zero Gee: Another Chet Kinsman story. This was a rather sexist story about Kinsman flying to a small space station with a ravishing female magazine photographer - and a decidedly plain-Jill chaperone astronaut...
The story took a nice twist when it turns out the photographer is damaged goods and will only have sex for babies (none yet) or business - not pleasure! I was actually hoping Kinsman would end up with the other woman, but no doing... In the end, he does have sex with the photographer - which is then totally glossed over as well. *annoyed* At least she blows him off after landing, leaving him alone and frustrated.
Living And Loving In Zero Gravity: An article for
Playboy. ;) Which then did not have terribly much to say about the Loving part after all.
A Small Kindness: Interesting story that Robert Silverberg would have later turned into an entire novel. ;) Felt rather... racist, though. The Cold War is over and a World Government has replaced the rule of nation states. But alas, it's not NWO or the Rothschilds who have taken over the Earth, but the Third World, and now they are ruining the West! Reverse colonialism! A man who lost his family in riots during the transition has turned assassin, and has set out to kill the "Black Saint", the leader of the Tanzanian delegation who is a kind of Ghandi/Mandela type.
Too bad he turns out to be a godlike alien who is trying to get humanity to not wipe itself out...
Galactic Geopolitics: A factual article dealing mostly with how alien races would interact with us, as well as stellar evolution. Hints at the Galactic habitable zone without naming it. It's from 1973 and therefore has some "facts" that are completely wrong... Bova mentions that two of the five nearest stars have a planet each, without naming them. Alas, all those "planets" from back then were false positives. Also, he asserts again and again that primordial gas from the Big Bang might be pure hydrogen or admixed with helium - no! This stuff is very well mixed and pristine gas is always hydrogen+helium.
Priorities: The shortest story at just four pages. An astrophysicist is aghast at being told there's no money in the budget of the US to explore extrasolar planets which have been shown to harbor intelligent races.
In the final paragraph, a blue-maned alien on one of those planets is aghast that the priests have forbidden further studies of the same planets (but now including Earth) - hoping the other races are not so stupid...
SETI: Non-fiction introduction to the topic from an early perspective. I'm certainly glad William Proxmire is not around anymore...
The Great Supersonic Zeppelin Race: Allegedly, it is possible to build a supersonic aircraft without a sonic boom, but the wing design involved produces no lift! So people (from Avco Everett, Bova used to work for this company) try to build a supersonic zeppelin!
This was definitely a satire, with scientists named Pencilbeam, ecologists named Sequoia, and a Soviet minister of transportation named Traktor... When the project does not work out in the end, they instead come up with... the Hyperloop!
(let's see how THAT project comes out...)
Blessed Be The Peacemakers: A short piece on the "Star Wars" anti-ballistic missile program and the risks and rewards it entails. I strongly assume this was later turned into an entire book, "Star Peace: Assured Survival", a book that became obsolete pretty quickly...
The Weathermakers: There's an entire novel of the same name which I also own, likely based on this 30-page story. Project THUNDER has been developed to kill hurricanes, by preventing them from truly forming by equalizing the temperature differences in tropical depressions that drive the heat engine. But when four such depressions/storms form in a chain, the relatively small project team faces a conundrum. They decide to dissipate the westernmost one (already in the Caribbean and near hurricane strength), and #3 and #4, which are still easy prey in the eastern Atlantic. But #2 then develops into a superpowerful hurricane they dub Omega, and it's heading straight for Washington!!!
Despite being forbidden any action, the team starts doing actual weather control, shifting the position of a high-pressure area and even putting a kink into the jet stream to deflect the hurricane to the northeast and out into the cold Atlantic. I can't check, but I assume this short story will show up very similar in the book, as the opener - and then the real fun (and calamity) begins! Lots of fun and again, I feel the urge to read the book now...
Man Changes the Weather: The most interesting of the non-fiction articles. I know quite a bit about the early days of SETI but this one contained a lot of stuff I had never heard about. It was written in 1973 and was quite (over)optimistic, and interestingly even in the intro, written over a decade later, Bova laments that not much more has happened. And today? Is anyone talking about modifying or controlling the weather?? Hell, we have European vs. American predictions of hurricane paths, despite computer power jumping many orders of magnitude compared to 1973...
(Go, European models, go!)
The Man Who...: Definitely the best story of the book. A young, pretty reporter from a glossy magazine is assigned to cover a "dark horse" presidential candidate, a senator from Montana. Right from the onset, she thinks she might have a juicy story, as he is visiting a medical lab. But nope, no cancer, he's just fine. And impressive. Over the following months of being "embedded", she falls in love with him, and he with her - or so it seems. Because at times, he can be friendly, but otherwise cold and unemotional toward her. She leaves the magazine, joins his staff and is dragged upward in his meteoric rise - until, shortly before the convention where he will be elected his party's presidential candidate, she finds out that he has spent a total of 16 hours on the phone with different policy experts while at the same time being mostly in her vicinity - all in a 7-hour period...
She flies across the country to the lab where she met him first, and meets him again - the "warm" him!! He then tells her that he and the leader of this lab have created six further identical clones, each of whom have become experts in certain policy fields. Juggling them around so that only one was visible at any given time, they created the illusion of the perfect, all-knowing, ever-energetic candidate. The last paragraph of the story is chilling. Of course, they had to keep the reporter in the lab "until after the inauguration." Now she tells us that they are treating her very well, but maybe... have they been putting things in her food? After all, she's pretty sure his second inauguration is coming up... Or is it the third? I have to admit I could not figure out the story's title, though.
The Seeds of Tomorrow: Musings on the history of science. Seems to be an excerpt from a book SO obscure that while it is listed on Goodreads, it has zero ratings, reviews, reads... And not even a cover picture. WTF?
All in all, these were three fun books. A few really awesome pieces, a few decidedly lackluster ones, most in the "good but not spectacular" realm. Which is, in my opinion, the general descriptor for Bova, I don't think I've read anything five-star from him yet, but also little three-star and below. Solid.
It took me far longer to wrap up Prometheans than anticipated - my second weekend after returning to Spain was a long one, with a holiday on Friday, but I did not finish the book until ten minutes after midnight on Sunday morning...