Customer Reviews

Venus

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(14)
2 star:		(13)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

There are many different sci-fi novels out there, but very few actually focus on our sister planet. The harsh environs of near Venus offer a strong antagonist in Bova's novel. Ban Bova is well known for his visualization and grand scheme and this book is no exception. The characters are well developed an fit together to give the story edge. While it is a little slow at times, the action sequences can take the breath away and prevent you from putting the book down. Definitely a good read if you are a Bova fan. If not, try reading his earlier books first because he is known to subtly weave his plot lines between books.

Venus (2000) is the first SF novel in the Planet Novel series. It takes place a decade or more after the Asteroid Wars. Van is the second son of Martin Humphries. His mother died during or shortly after childbirth, so Martin often accuses Van of causing her death. He is shorter than most men (and many women), so Martin has called him runt for as long as Van can remember. Van accepted this psychological abuse as only proper; he doesn't even question the right or justice of such remarks.

In this novel, Martin Humphries has offered a reward of ten billion dollars for the retrieval of the remains of Alex, his first son, from Venus. Since Van has always revered his older brother, he announces that he will be making an attempt to recover the body. He hires Tomas Rodriguez to design an appropriate spaceship and to supervise construction of the Hesperos. He also intends to appoint Tomas as Captain, but Martin foists Desiree Duchamp upon him as the Captain; Van is finally forced to select Duchamp over Rodriguez, but insists that Tomas be second-in-command.

Besides Duchamp and Rodriguez, Van's crew includes three technicians, Dr. Waller, and Marguerite Duchamp, a biologist and Desiree's duplicate or clone. The captain has bumped the astronomer to add Marguerite to the crew. After all, she doesn't want to leave her daughter in the lustful hands of old humper Martin.

Martin reports that Lars Fuchs, an old enemy, is building a ship in the Belt to take to Venus to win the prize money. Of course, Van worries about the competition and listens closely to Martin's comments about Fuchs. As it happens, Fuchs's ship gets to Venus prior to the Hesperos.

Marguerite is certain that the high clouds around the planet will contain life. When she discovers microscopic droplets of water in the clouds, she is even more convinced that there will be life. But life needs food and the lifeforms in the high clouds are first noticed as they start eating the ship.

This novel is essentially a coda to the Asteroid Wars series. In that war, Fuchs led the revolt of the Belt miners against the mercenaries hired by Humphries. The war was ended when Van's mother agreed to marry Martin in exchange for the life of Fuchs. Of course, Martin hadn't actually killed Fuchs, but he had broken him financially. So the ten billion dollar prize attracted Fuchs and his friends like a bear to a bee tree.

This novel starts out as the story of a rich brat playing at adventure. Still, Van gains more self-esteem as he slowly breaks out of his passive persona. Each risky incidence increases his self-confidence. By the end of the tale, Van is a changed man.

Recommended for Bova fans and for anyone else who enjoys tales of planetary adventures with a twist.

-Arthur W. Jordin

When I started reading this tale, I was less than impressed with Ben Bova's choice of a protagonist. But, the reader quickly begins to empathize with Van Humphries, the somewhat sickly, younger son of billionaire, Martin Humphries.

The plot develops as Martin-still mourning the lost of his first son Alex; whose spaceship crashed on the first manned expedition to Venus-withdraws his financial support for Van. Simultaneously, Martin announces a $10 billion Venus Prize to the first person who recovers Alex's remains from the planet's scorching surface. Reluctantly, Van rises to the challenge, and puts together an expedition in search of his monetary independence.

In a well-paced tale, Van encounters incredible dangers and a determined rival, Lars Fuchs (his fathers arch-enemy), as he descends through Venus's hellish atmosphere. Van experiences real character growth as he struggles to overcome everything his shipmates and Venus can throw at him.

You know the writing is good when you stay up late because you've got to find out what happens next. That's what happened to me when I reached the book's climax.

--David Hitchcock, author, VIRTUAL LIFE and PATENT SEARCHING MADE EASY

I just finished this book on tape. Had I not been behind the wheel for 1000 miles, I probably would not have completed it. The plot is elementary and completely predictable. The chapter titles in general are able to summarize the entire plot in 1-3 words. The main character's personna is built around a medical condition that is completely untenable, particularly with respect to rapidity of symptoms. A number of factual errors regarding Venus and the mechanics of space flight are made. The writer seems to have a limited bag of cliche' phrases which are sighted often (also in other offerings from him). The ultimate outcome is predictable from chapter #1 and no surprises, apart from occasional random acts of violence, are seen.

I approached this novel as a fan of good literature, not as a SF fan, so maybe I am the wrong audiance. But after recently reading SF classics like Stapledon's Last and First Men and Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea I have begun to understnad what good SF is and how powerful it can be. SF can be great lit. Unfortunatly this novel is not an example of that and it pales in comparison to those novels. Bova cares very little for his characters, he ignores his plot and uses all the aspects of storytelling as merely a vehicle to talk about the possibilities of treking to Venus. I admit some of his scientific ideas appear well researched and are very interesting, but the rest of the book is packed with cliches, flat characters and rediculous plot devices. This may appeal to fans of Bova, or fans of SF, but not to someone looking for a great story or good literature.

This is a painful experiance to read.

Overal I found it boring and cliche riddled. The characters are purely 'off the shelf' and are about as uninteresting as you can get. The science will grab you attention for a few seconds, but there is far too little of it for my liking.

After finishing 'Venus' I quite literally threw it out my window into the rubbish bin outside. Maybe you'll like it, but this sci-fi fan found it poor beyond words.

Ben Bova is one of science fiction's best known authors and editors. He is not a great writer but he can deliver entertaining stories. Venus is a light read and an entertaining story but not one that will stand the test of time.

Venus features a character named Van Humphries who accepts his father's challenge to travel to Venus and recover his brother's dead body. At stake are $10 billion and his father's respect. Humphries must face a number of challenges along the way including the hostile Venusian conditions, a competing expedition and his own weaknesses. If this sounds familiar, it is. However, the possibilities involved in landing an expedition on Venus which is the hellhole of the solar system are too tempting to ignore. Venus is a very readable book and the familiarity and predictability of the plot only add to its charm.

I was particularly entertained by his descriptions of the Venusian climate, the wind conditions, the intense heat and the great pressure. Just when I was getting annoyed at the lack of explanation of the ship's modus operandi, Bova began to explain heat exchangers. Still there wasn't very much depth in the explanation. I expect that thermodynamics is not Bova's specialty.

All in all, Venus is nice light read although I would save it for a cold winter night when the description of the heat might be really appreciated.

Martin Humphries, a fabulously wealthy industrialist living on a lunar colony, passionately despises his second son, Van. Cruelly labeling him as "the runt" and bullying him relentlessly as a directionless, untalented weakling, Humphries blames Van for the death of his wife during Van's birth and, in fact, resents him for even being alive. Humphries' beloved eldest son, Alex, who Van also loved dearly, lost his life in the first manned exploration of the surface of Venus. When Humphries announces that he is terminating his son's stipend and that he is offering a $10 billion prize to the first person who recovers his beloved Alex's remains from Venus, it is quite clear that Van, who is without any other means of support, is being manipulated and forced by his own father into choosing a path that will likely lead to his death. The waters become muddied and the fight for that almost unimaginably large prize becomes a heated race when Lars Fuchs, a rock rat from the Asteroid belt and Humphries' long time corporate foe, announces he is also making a play for the prize.

"Venus" won't win any prizes when it comes to literary status. Nor does it convey any subliminal moral messages, political satire, mystical symbolism or any of those other things that deep thinkers often consider necessary for a novel to be deemed truly great. But if you're looking for a hard-driving plot with palpable suspense and superb hard science fiction supported by a wealth of current hard scientific fact, then "Venus" is a novel you'll want to read. Bova's ability to weave science seamlessly into a fast-paced plot is simply wonderful - orbital and celestial mechanics, plate tectonics, volcanism, planetary evolution, chemistry, biology, physics, aerospace engineering, rocketry and more. In fact, it's safe to say that Venus, with a hostile surface environment straight out of Dante's Inferno, is the major character in the novel!

But, let's take nothing away from the rest of the novel. Bova's characters, in a word, succeed! They evoke emotions in a reader fully ensnared in the action who will care about what happens. His heroes have their flaws and weaknesses but they're likable and they develop meaningfully over the course of the novel. His villains are despicable but they too evolve in an understandable human way. The dialogue is appropriate to the environment of a quasi-military space exploration vehicle. And the twist ending - well, suffice it to say that there is one! Let's not give anything away other than to say it will bring a smile to most reader's faces!

Highly recommended.

Paul Weiss

Though obviously set within the same continuum both Bova's "Moonrise" books and the Mars series, "Venus" sets itself apart from either of those stories. In "Venus", set in the near future, a ruthless tycoon offers an even $10 billion (what will that buy by then?) to the first person who can retrieve the remains of his eldest son from the ruthless surface of never-colonized Venus. Martin Humphries's first son died while trying to land on Venus years ago. His surviving son, Van, is a whiny, spoiled brat who suffers from a rare and incurable anemia. In a stroke of genius, Bova makes Van (as unsympathetic a character as you can get) the hero. Van is no fearless strapping pioneer - he explores planets using VR goggles - but his love for his dead brother draws him to Venus. (Van also needs the prize money, since Humphries has cut off Van's stipend to pay for it.) Because of his love for his brother, and hatred of his father, winning the prize seems the best way to achieve two aims - all Van must do is reclaim his brother's remains...from the surface of a planet that approximates hell itself.

Also vying for the prize is the mysterious Lars Fuchs. An old enemy of Humphries, Fuchs made his fortunes as a "rock rat", a sort of wildcat driller essentially exiled to the asteroid belt. The enmity between the two provides some of the mystery to the story. Though Humphries is the typical villain in the Bova mold (filthy rich and an anti-environmentalist tycoon - essentially evil incorporate), Fuchs is an enigmatic genius in the Verne mode - of dark moods, many secrets and an oversized ego. Fuchs also has an ominous taste in naming his spaceships. (Fuch's spaceship is named "Lucifer"; the descent module is named "Hecate" after the underworld goddess.) Bova even tosses in a sort of love-interest in the beautiful Marguerite Duchamp. When disaster strikes, and the two must throw their lot in with the enigmatic Fuchs, Bova becomes deliberately vague about what Duchamp must do to save herself and Humphries from their savior and captor.

The characters are compelling, but the real star is Venus, one of those worlds that seethes damnation. Closer to the sun, Venus is exposed to more heat than Earth, but can't vent it because of the clouds of sulfuric acid that enshroud it. Because there's no liquid water, Venus has no "fuel" for the geological movement needed to vent the planet's interior heat. With volcanic pressure of Venus's core steadily building up without release, the planet is turning into a geological time-bomb. With its slower planetary rotation, Venus accepts the brunt of the sun's energy on one side, (the "subsolar"), generating huge storms called "super-rotations". Bova makes all of this clear to the reader, not simply because he uses Van as the narrator but makes Van something approachable to readers - a planetologist making the leap, not from one planet to another, but from a virtual version of one planet to another. Bova doesn't serve the heaping moralism of the Moonrise and Mars books (in which anything "corporate" is bad; also in which some fabulous new technology is assailed by fundamentalist religious types, and become available only to the very rich), though expensive technology firmly demarcates the line between haves and have-nots more forcefully than in those other books. Though Van's transformation to hero is a bit too pat, and there's little-enough sense of time or tension as to what he will find when his chance comes to land on Venus, "Venus" the story still excels in the climax.

The only reason I gave this book 3 stars was the great descriptions of what Venus' surface must look like. The characters and plot weren't that great, standard sci-fi stuff. The premise was OK, but a little off-the-wall. It is only when Bova describes Venus itself that the book becomes worth reading.