Customer Reviews

Voyagers

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3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

In the 1980s the world is still under threat of nuclear annihilation, memories of the Bay of Pigs nightmare are still fresh and the Cold War is still very much a fact in the world's political life. Carl Sagan is at the height of his popularity. UFO sightings still occur with astonishing regularity. SETI (the search for extraterrestrial intelligence) is making headlines in the popular scientific press. The right wing fundamentalist Christian movement in the USA is gathering a full head of steam and preachers with the oratorical skill of Billy Graham can pack a stadium to the rafters. Radio astronomy is a relatively new science. The Roman Catholic Church is sensing that it is a diminishing influence in the first world so it is looking to increase its flock by ensuring its power base in the third world is strong. A woman in a position of influence or power is a rare phenomenon. The "publish or perish" culture in scientific circles outside of the Soviet Union is in full bloom.

This is the world in which Ben Bova has a team of radio astronomers detect a signal in orbit around Jupiter that is clearly the work of an intelligent extraterrestrial species. No space opera, hard-boiled action or fantastic imagined scientific technology here, I'm afraid! Bova simply asks us to contemplate how a real 1980s world with 1980s technology would react if it knew that an intelligent space-faring alien creature was headed in a craft towards earth.

What a simple but effective premise for an engaging story!

On the down side, Bova has taken a purely melodramatic, almost laughably soap opera approach to the development of the relationships between his characters in the story. The men in the story are either heroes or wimps and the chauvinism that they exhibit toward the single strong female character in the tale is beyond outrageous. That said, Bova has created a provoking tale of the possible effects of a close encounter of the third kind on world politics, religion, relationships, science, culture and mainstream life in the USA.

Despite the fact that virtually everything about the story is now seriously dated, it is simple (and I would suggest useful) for the reader to examine today's world and ask themselves the very same question. What would my world become if I suddenly KNEW that we were not alone, that we were about to be visited by an ambassador of an intelligent species that was clearly possessed of technology well beyond anything we could produce and whose motives, culture and language were completely unknown to us?

I thank Ben Bova for providing me with a basis to contemplating that most provocative question.

Recommended.

"Voyagers" is the first book of the "Voyagers" tetralogy and the first novel of his I've read. The novel was published in 1980 (for the 2005 audiobook version, Bova apparently revised the text).

"Voyagers" is billed as a "First Contact" novel, putting it in the same subgenre as Arthur C. Clarke's classic "Rendezvous with Rama." However, that's where the similarity ends. Unlike "Rama," "Voyagers" takes place mostly on the ground. It doesn't even get into space until chapter 40. This is a Book with a Message. It's sort of a modern, modified morality play, and although secularized, the religious overtones are discernible: The protagonist's "arc" goes from idealism to cynicism and melancholy to exaltation and redemption by sacrificing his life in the name of a higher ideal (here comes the Message), which is: If only we humans could outgrow our outmoded beliefs, blind fanaticism, mindless rivalries and proclivity for violence, we could unite as a species and rise to even greater heights of achievement and inspiration.

"Voyagers" takes us back to another time: The Cold War is on, and the US and the USSR face off across the Iron Curtain. Scientists in both countries detect strange radio emissions from Jupiter. The US's space telescope, the Big Eye (this was about 12 years before the Hubble), sees an object in Jupiter space that can't be anything but a spacecraft. The alien spacecraft leaves Jupiter orbit and heads for Earth. This is kept secret by both countries until it can't be hidden anymore. A joint US-Soviet team rides a Soviet spacecraft on a course to rendezvous with the alien.

However, this is preceded by chapters 1-39, which detail the collision of the main characters' profoundly dysfunctional lives with Cold War political machinations, and the tone of the book is pretty sour. The main characters are three: Keith Stoner, whose life and career have gone downhill since his astronaut days; Kirill Markov, a philandering Russian ethnolinguist; and Jo Camerata, a gorgeous, voluptuous, promiscuous young graduate student with a heart of gold, after whom most of the male characters in the book lust at one time or another. (Oh yeah, lots of them in academia.) None of these characters is particularly likeable to begin with (they more or less redeem themselves by the end), but they seem like saints compared to a gaggle of thoroughly disagreeable supporting characters, who include Markov's harridan wife, a British scientist and double agent with electrodes in his head, a homosexual French cosmologist and Catholic priest, and a young Dutch astronomer addicted to PCP. There is a poorly developed subplot involving a fundamentalist preacher, and an absurd subplot involving Soviet mind control that seems lifted right out of "The Manchurian Candidate."

Technology and politics: Technology advances so fast that techno-tales like "Voyagers" date rapidly. We expect futuristic gadgets in futuristic novels. "Voyagers" takes us back to a time of primitive computers and no fax machines, cell phones, CDs, digital cameras, printers, the Internet, email, the GPS, and smart devices. Back in 1980 nobody except a few experts could have predicted that in another decade, communism would fall and the USSR would cease to exist.

When we finally get a gander at the alien, he is absurdly humanoid, with bilateral symmetry and a head and four limbs and ribs and so forth. Bova gets a number of things wrong about Russia. Inexplicably, Bova's editor didn't catch his complete mangling of Russian patronymics. Also, the Russian space program doesn't use countdowns; that's an American invention, borrowed from a movie. (At the risk of being a nitpicker:) Just before launch, an official message is transmitted to the crew and the media by the Soviet president. While that certainly would have been possible, on such a momentous occasion, the message would more likely have come from the Soviet prime minister, who with rare exceptions in Soviet history was also the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which was the office with the real power. Some Soviet leaders held all three posts at once! One detail that stretches credulity to the breaking point is that a Soviet scientist who is also a spy could possess a largish suitcase that contains top-secret Soviet mind-control equipment (powered by a RADIOACTIVE ISOTOPE) and get it through security when bringing it to an American base!

While Bova's prose moves pretty well, and this book may be enjoyable to really devoted sci-fi fans, I found it lugubrious (now there's a $2 word!) at the beginning, cloying in the middle, and sappy at the end.

Plenty of other reviews here go over the "plot" of this turkey. Warning: SPOILER ALERT. I'd like to tell you why this is one of the worst SF novels I've read in over 50 years.

Bova doesn't give us a single believable character, motivation or relationship.

Think about it. The bad guys want to do away with our hero. Since Wilie Coyote is not available, they come up with plan (a), which is to capture a British POW of the Japanese who was subsequently captured by the Russians and brainwashed (Korean Candidate style) so that he would feed PCP to a young astronemer and hyptnotize him into attacking Stone, who is a black belt in something dangerous. Plan (b) is to sneak a bomb onto a "tanker" rocket that's bound to rendevous with our hero nearly a million miles from Earth. What ever happened to knives, guns and poison? And, while we're at it, why do the bad guys want to kill our hero in the first place?

The British POW is presented as a cardboard characture. He doesn't talk like a real brit of that generation (like my mother).

And consider the love interest, Jo. Obviously a knockout, though we are left to imagine the details. Unaccountably in love with our middle-aged hero before the story starts. Strips and jumps his bones to prove she cares. Sleeps with the villian to protect her true love. Again, we have a villian without a clear motive. He's just nasty, fat, old, smelly and he has erectile disfunction. He pretty well drops out of the plot midway and all that pent up disgust the reader has developed for him is wasted.

Much of the action takes place at the Kwajalein base. Ben Bova has apparently never been to this base, which isn't much of a problem for readers since very few people have. But I was there at about the time this story takes place. As Bova walked me around his fantasy base, it just reminded how the entire story was just unwinding on automatic. Too bad. That base is a fascinating place. You write 100 novels about it.

At last, we have the grand finale in which Jo is reassured that Stoner really loves her. Stoner invests a few of his last words to testify that he's loved her from the beginning when we know that he completely ignored her at until their preposterous first love scene. Does anybody proof read these things?

If you subtract the vapid religious overtones, the political intrigue, the 14-year-old wet dream sex and the silly plots of implausible villians, you're left with a pretty good idea. Maybe enough for a short story. If you want a five star treatment of a very similar theme, check out "Camoflage" by Joe Haldeman.

Yep, pretty good read. Almost more of a political drama than a science fiction novel as the various parties around the world play power games with each other.

Stoner knew. The fiery object hurtling toward Earth was an alien spacecraft. But the world might never know. He was trapped behind a curtain of secrecy. Because the discovery had shattered the world power balance, setting of a struggle for supremacy that raged from the sacred halls of the Vatican to the corridors of the Kremlin and the Pentagon. The forces of fear and treachery would use any weapon at their command to keep the world in darkness.

Helped by a Soviet linguist and a young student, Stoner planned a desperate mission to preserve the legacy of the star vouager for all mankind.

The burearcratic politics of a space classic is pure Bova. And the sense of awe when Stoner finally gazes upon an alien face is pure art. This is the most convincing account I have ever read of how mankind might react to first contact.

Although the book talks about cold war stuff, its still very engaging. Good charactor development, and the pay off at the end is worth the journey. I would recomend it to anyone, some adult themes, but all in all, a great audio book! Stephan Rudicki is superb, as always.

Ben Bova has been known for writing very long books. This one is no exception.

It took Mr. Bova almost the entire book to make it interesting. And the end was as dull and slow as the beginning. If I could, I would use more adjectives to discuss my dislike for this book; however, to do so would be akin to Mr. Bova's drawn-on language.

I understand there are more books in The Voyager series and I cannot wait, not to read them. Woe be to those that would buy them or even try to read them.

I really enjoyed this book as I do with most Ben Bova titles. I'm looking forward to reading the second in the series.

Have not had time to read it yet, looking forward to it. Ben Bova is a great writer and one of the best in science fiction. Book was delivered quickly, and is in good condition.

A very good book, typical Bova, thoroughly enjoyed this book, hope you do too