Customer Reviews

Voyagers

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The story revolves around a first contact premise. Published in the glory days of SETI, the book describes social, political, and religious reactions to the presence of an alien spacecraft in our solar system. Detected by ex NASA astronaut and radio astronomer, Keith Stoner, near Jupiter, the alien heads for Earth. Failing to make radio contact, our leading man convinces the US and Soviet governments to send a manned expedition to rendezvous with the spacecraft. Some slightly entertaining action and plot twists. However, the story suffers from unlikable, cliché characters.

I found this book entertaining but some of the flaws were inescapable. I read and enjoy a wide range of science fiction and fantasy and my favorite stories are the ones that are plausible not only just in science but in the character roles, behavior, and how they support the story. Here is a list of things I found distracting in the book:

1.) Story is set during cold war era which made the book feel like an outdated copy of the movie 2010.

2.) Let's face it there are no supermodel look-a-like women in the world of science as much as hollywood and authors like this would lead you to believe.

3.) If there were they would not throw themselves with reckless abandon at washed up college professors.

4.) The sex in the story was neither arousing nor did it add anything to the plot

5.) Stoner (the main character) gets away with unbelievable acts of disobedience and stubbornness against government organizations in this book to the point where he would either be mopping floors or a stain on the wall in real life. In real life he would not be as critical to the mission as the author makes all the characters treat him.

6.) The author paints an environment where the whole world has a ridiculous fascination and infatuation with stoner's every thought and move. Its as if the goal of the whole book is for the whole world to feel sorry for, empathize with , and be ashamed they do not think like the main character.

On top of these flaws the book is not terribly well written or easy to listen to but I enjoyed the story for its individual approach to a first contact situation handled during a cold war climate.

Its amazing how 25 years can take some books and turn them from what might have been an interesting premise and exploration into an awkward tedious read. Bova in my mind has never been a great writer. I enjoy reading his stories because of his very unique takes. However when you combine Bova's dense handling of language with the plot stretched out across a world view that has long since faded, this gets in the way of everything else.

Here, in Voyagers, we are presented with a world that is without the technology we have today. Computers, wireless phones, fundamentalism, and the end of the cold war have all yet to pass. The characters exist in a world that is difficult to relate to. The story also drags on and on. This is at its heart a fairly simple tale about a group of idealists who want to save this spaceship heading towards our planet and the obstacles that are placed in their paths.

Id skip this book. Its slow and frustrating to read.

"Voyagers" is the first book of the "Voyagers" tetralogy and the first novel of his I've read, or rather listened to. The novel was published in 1980; for the 2005 audiobook version, Bova apparently revised the text. I'm reviewing the audiobook.

"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!

An annoying feature of the audiobook is the failure of the reader to do his homework: When voicing Russians speaking English, he pronounces a lot of Russian words as they sound in English, not in Russian. For example, he stresses "Soyuz" and "Salyut" on the first syllable as is commonly heard in English, not on the last as is correct in Russian.

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.

The audio book runs about 13 hours and we found ourselves fast forwarding many times as we found the book slow moving and filled with silly sex that added little if nothing to the story. It is not appropiate if there are children in the car.

Now if you find a readers digest condensed version it may be worth the time.