Phil Giunta

Jamie Waterman, part Navajo, geologist, Mars explorer and hero. The latter two almost did not happen but for a few serendipitous events that promoted Waterman from backup geologist to primary team member. He is eventually chosen to be among an international crew of 25 scientists, astronauts, and cosmonauts who embark on an eighteen month round trip to Mars and spend 60 days on its surface gathering rock samples, recording climate changes, searching for water…and life.

In doing so, the scientists, astronauts, and cosmonauts find themselves battling more than the planet’s harsh conditions and treacherous terrain. Waterman finds himself in hot water with the bureaucrats on Earth when he fails to recite his rehearsed speech upon arrival on Mars, lapsing into a brief Navajo greeting instead.

Days after their arrival, a micro meteor storm damages their inflatable domicile, and causes another issue that comes back to haunt them later in the story. A few weeks later, when one of the Japanese scientists working on Deimos has a stroke, the media goes into a feeding frenzy, swarming Alberto Brumado, the public face of the mission and it’s most ardent supporter. Is Mars too dangerous for us to explore? Is it worth risking human lives? Brumado’s daughter Joanna is among the scientists on the planet, working closely with Waterman. At times, a bit too closely perhaps.

When he is convinced that a formation in a cliff wall of Tithonium Chasma might be the remains of an ancient civilization, Waterman pushes against authority to have the mission planned changed to allow a return to the area. However, a mysterious illness and a crash of their Mars rover prevent Waterman from reaching his target. Against orders from mission control to evacuate the base, two of the Russian cosmonauts and the base’s British chief medical officer set out to rescue Waterman’s team in another rover only to find themselves unable to cross a massive sand filled crater. It’s up to a sick and weakened Waterman to take charge by leaving his stranded rover and walking miles around the crater with a steel cable to connect the two vehicles.

All was not lost, however, as lichens are discovered in the rocks at the base of Tithonium Chasma. Life on Mars!

Bova does an exemplary job of chronicling an expedition to Mars in a scientifically sound story. This is a solid “hard SF” tale that does a fair job of exploring the human element in each of the main characters but only Waterman truly has any depth. In his usual style, Bova will pull the readers out of the storyline every so often to spend a brief chapter describing the background of a particular character. These days, some people call that “info dumping” and would prefer to see characters develop and reveal their backgrounds as the story progresses. I’m not particularly bothered by it, however, as these flashbacks are only about a page and a half long.

Bova tends to gloss over some of the hardships and temptations that might exist when two dozen people are cramped in a small living space in rough conditions for two months. There are the occasional arguments, lustful desires, plotting and scheming, fears, and backstabbing, but they are superficial and often dwindle away as the story progresses. Exploration and science are at the forefront of Bova’s MARS.

Bova returns Jamie Waterman to Mars with his sequels Return to Mars and Mars Life. I think he did a better job on the human element in those stories.

I always wanted to see a follow up story where private detective Adrian Monk takes the “cool pill” prescribed by Dr. Kroger in the televised episode “Mr. Monk Takes His Medicine”. I found it hilarious and at the same time, very poignant and touching to observe what happens when the pill’s effects wear off and Monk returns to his life of OCD and social paranoia. I was curious to see how differently Natalie would handle the situation as opposed to Sharona, Monk’s former assistant/nurse.

I was not disappointed. Lee Goldberg, writer of several Monk TV episodes, crafts the story adeptly, putting Monk on the pill only at the beginning and end of the story and describing Monk’s behavior in detail the first time while leaving it to the reader’s imagination for his second dose.

In between, Monk finds himself in Hawaii, intruding on Natalie’s vacation. While there, he solves a myriad of crimes for the police including murder, a series of burglaries, and drug smuggling. Before and after the crimes, Monk also publicly reveals a lying bigamist (to Natalie’s embarrassment) and a charlatan psychic.

This the second Monk novel I’ve read, the first being Mr. Monk Goes to the Firehouse, and I enjoyed them both.

If you think the plethora of phobias plaguing detective Adrian Monk is insufferable, wait until he is reinstated to the San Francisco Police Department as acting captain of homicide. When the Blue Flu strikes the SFPD, including Captain Leland Stottlemeyer and Lt. Randy Disher, the mayor reinstates Monk along with three other former detectives, each with their own mental issues….and assistants. Much to the chagrin of Stottlemeyer, Monk happily accepts the job of commanding the “scabs”, and delves into a series of murders that include astrologers, a cop-killer, and a predator with a female foot fetish known as the Golden Gate Strangler.

Monk’s team includes a retiree with bouts of senility aided by his bored, apathetic granddaughter, a gunslinger with anger issues who bullies his counselor, and a paranoiac with a tinfoil covered head full of alien abduction conspiracies shadowed by her shrink.

They make Natalie grateful, believe me.

As usual with his Monk novels, Lee Goldberg adroitly captures the characters and creates plausible mysteries-within-mysteries as on the television series. Each of Goldberg’s stories is told completely from the POV of Natalie Teeger, a young widow and single mom who is also Adrian Monk’s full time assistant/caretaker. As a long time fan of the TV series, I can easily hear the voices of Tony Shalhoub, Ted Levine, Jason Gray-Stanford, and Traylor Howard when reading the dialogue. There is little to no fluff in the Monk novels which I also admire. Each scene and chapter moves the story along while also taking the time for character development.

This is clearly a well planned story with excellent plot and character development. I can’t actually pin it down to being solely a SF tale, as it has many shades of Fantasy as well. It was interesting to watch the main character’s strict religious beliefs slowly peel away as he was confronted with, and later reluctantly (at first) integrated into, a wildly different society with “shocking” beliefs. Excellent storytelling and pacing as well. All around great work!

Star traveler Keith Stoner and his family return to Earth in the ancient alien ship that once held Stoner in cryonic freeze decades before. When he rejoined the human race the first time, the technology of the alien ship had ushered in a new age of enlightenment for the human race. Now, however, no trace of Stoner’s previous visit to his home planet can be found and not one of the technological advancements—“gifts from the stars”—is evident. Instead, Stoner finds an alternate Earth, one controlled by ultra-conservative religious groups. In the case of the USA, it’s the New Morality.

At the same time, engineer Raoul Tavalera arrives home after six years aboard the Goddard Habitat orbiting Saturn. There, he had fallen in love with the project’s fiery administrator, Holly Lane. Tavalera returns to an Earth as alien to him as it is to Stoner and he quickly longs to return to Holly, but he finds himself under the thumb of the New Morality. They have pervaded, and in fact invaded, American government, schools, even private homes, all in the name of unifying the nation under Christ.

Meanwhile, rumblings of nuclear war stir Stoner into action. After Tavalera is recruited to work for the New Morality, he encouters Stoner and for a time, becomes the star travelers human contact. However, what Stoner and Tavalera do not realize is that key players in the New Morality are setting a trap for Stoner using an international summit of the world’s three largest nuclear powers—USA, China, and Iran.

Dr. Bova does a fair job in crossing his own universes here, despite the lack of explanation as to how it happened. Readers of his Grand Tour series will recognize the New Morality which is omnipresent in each story from that series. In The Return, however, the story merely eludes to the possibility that “somehow” this must be an alternate Earth than what Stoner left a century before to continue his exploration of the cosmos.

Also, the character of Stoner’s wife, Jo Camerata, is nearly irrelevant to the story, relegated to a “nervous-Nellie” who spends her time inconsistently warning and chiding her husband and children about interfering in human evolution yet not exactly stepping in to prevent it. In Voyagers II, Camerata had been a fierce, bold captain of industry with the temerity to manage an entire corporation while surviving the insane machinations of her conniving, murderous husband.

All told, The Return is a decent ending to the series despite the aforementioned issues. Bova’s flawed, human characters are well developed even if Stoner’s family is not. The story and pacing make for a definite page turner.

Awakened after eighteen years in cryonic stasis aboard an alien spacecraft, astronaut Keith Stoner has returned to Earth. Yet both Stoner and his home planet have changed. The starship, now orbiting Earth, has provided several remarkable leaps in technology for the human race and as Stoner starts life anew, he finds some startling alterations within himself—he is now sharing his mind with that of the dead alien found aboard the ship nearly two decades ago. At the time, it had been Stoner’s decision to leave behind all that he knew for a chance to explore the cosmos. Now, he finds himself becoming increasingly devoid of emotion in exchange for superhuman mental abilities and a relentless drive to change his corrupt and war torn world for the better.

Stoner flees captivity from Vanguard Corporation, the company responsible for reviving him. It’s president, Jo Camerata, a former flame of Stoner’s, assists in his escape knowing that her sadistic CEO husband Everett Nillson would take whatever measures necessary to extract every bit of alien intelligence from the astronaut. Yet even Jo cannot control Stoner as he eventually leaves her and reunites with old friends, makes new allies, and travels the world in an attempt to bring peace to war ravaged Africa and shut down a global terrorist organization known as the World Liberation Movement.

Ben Bova crafts a fast paced story with political and corporate intrigue and a central character that reminded me very much of Klaatu from The Day The Earth Stood Still. Well, Klaatu with some burgeoning Jedi abilities. :-) The other main characters are also fairly well developed although the focus is almost completely on Stoner. The story is not without some twists as some characters reveal their true colors and loyalties. The backdrop of bloody politics and corporate backstabbing of Stoner’s Earth are among the few things that have not changed in his eighteen year absence and reflect the sad state of affairs in our own reality.

The exploration of Mars has become a source of fervent contention between dedicated scientists and an extremist Christian order known as The New Morality (an organization present in many, if not all, installments of Bova’s “Grand Tour” series).

Bova picks up the story on Mars as narcissistic anthropologist Carter Carleton, whose reputation on Earth is tarnished by charges of sexual assault on a student, uncovers a bone fragment in what is considered an ancient Martian village previously discovered by Jamie Waterman. Waterman is now the project’s Science Director who had left Mars and returned to Earth years ago along with geologist-turned-business tycoon Dex Trumball.

However, now that the New Morality has infiltrated the United States government and successfully schemed to sever all federal funding for the Mars project and its “Godless scientists”, further exploration is jeopardized. Years before, the US Government had decided to turn jurisdiction of Mars over to the Navajo Indians and as long as at least one Navajo resided on Mars, the planet would remain under their purview. Should the final Navajo, Billy Graycloud, leave the planet then the fate of Mars would be up for grabs. The Earth’s wealthy are already lined up to turn it into a tourist attraction. A situation that Jamie Waterman will not allow as it would contaminate the dig sites where the ancient Martian village (and shortly after, cemetary had been discovered. However, it would solve the project’s financial problems…

On Earth, The New Morality has blocked all media coverage of Mars and forced schools to remove any mention of it from their curricula. As a result, Jamie Waterman, a Navajo Indian and geologist returns to Mars to offer his support and expertise while Dex remains earthside in an effort to appeal to the private sector for funding. Dex finds every avenue blocked by the fact that Earth is suffering from extreme climate change to due to severe increase in greenhouse gases. Mars is no longer a concern for people struggling for their very lives. To make matter worse, a New Morality priest, also a geologist, decides to travel to Mars on a mission to bridge the gap between science and religion, only to die of a brain hemmorrhage shortly after arriving on the red planet as a result of a condition which he had concealed from the doctors during his pre-Mars physical.

As usual, Dr. Bova presents an intelligent, stimulating tale of scientific discovery while also creating engaging characters mired in conflict. The resolution is not black and white but instead, hopeful, as is often the case in life. Although the New Morality’s hostile intrusion on human liberties and their infiltration of the US government are allegorical, it seems unlikely to happen in today’s society where church and state are being driven apart more than ever in American history. However, from what I gathered, the greenhouse
crisis on Earth was an opportunity for the New Morality to frighten the country into believing that God’s wrath was upon them.

Mars Life is definitely a recommended read.

Jupiter is the second book I’ve read in Ben Bova’s Grand Tour series. I started, appropriately, with Mercury and enjoyed it. Jupiter was next on the list because I was curious as to its connection with an earlier Bova novel, As on a Darkling Plain, in which explorers dive into Jupiter’s violent, toxic oceans in a craft filled with breathable fluid. While there, they discover life in the form of large creatures reminiscent of Earth’s whales yet far more massive.

In Jupiter, young astro-physicist Grant Archer is recruited, much to his chagrin, by religious order known as the New Morality to spy on “godless scientists” on a space station orbiting Jupiter. Archer is a Believer but with an open mind. He is also married and working on his doctoral thesis but despite his protests, New Morality official Ellis Beech invokes a public service clause that dictates all scientists must serve a minimum of four years wherever the government deems fit to send them, even if the assignment is unrelated to their discipline. The New Morality suspects that the scientists on the station are conducting unauthorized searches for intelligent life on Jupiter.

Once arriving at the space station, Archer assimilates into the team of scientists under the wrathful eye of crippled director, Dr. Wo (known as “Old Woeful” to the team). After working his way up the ranks from errand boy, Archer is given the opportunity to study Jupiter’s tidal patterns (known as fluid dynamics) and eventually becomes part of a team that pilots a submersible space craft into Jupiter’s oceans under the command of the cantankerous, and partially blind, Dr. Krebs.

The craft, christened the Zheng He, was specifically—and secretly—constructed for the purpose of withstanding the pressure of Jupiter’s oceans to a depth of ten thousand kilometers. Again, the craft is filled with the breathable fluid and, as also described in As on a Darkling Plain, the crew is surgically altered with implants that allow them to connect directly to the ship’s computers through a series of fiber optic cables.

However, when the New Morality receives no reports from Archer, they visit the station personally in an effort to shut down the project. For if intelligent life were discovered, it would be considered blasphemy and would undermine nearly all of Earth’s religions. Ignoring a hail from the New Morality to return to the station immediately, Dr. Krebs orders the Zheng He deeper into Jupiter’s treacherous oceans, even bringing the vessel close to the Great Red Spot in search of these Leviathans.

A veteran author of science fact and science fiction, Bova is a master at developing characters and stories and moves both along adeptly without need of fluff or filler. His scientific prowess is evident in the details and while it is fiction, that knowledge makes each moment entirely believable. Jupiter was a thoroughly engrossing adventure.

Previous to Mercury, I had just completed Ben Bova’s As On A Darkling Plain and I can tell you that Dr. Bova certainly enjoys his love triangles. In Mercury, brilliant engineer Mance Bracknell constructs the Skytower, a space elevator, in Ecuador alongside bioengineer Victor Molina. The tower stretches beyond Earth’s atmosphere to a space platform in geostationary orbit. Bracknell’s success inspires him to break out of his reticent shell and ask his girlfriend, Lara Tierney, for her hand in marriage. Unbeknownst to Bracknell, Molina is also in love with Lara.

Meanwhile, Elliot Danvers, a priest with a religious order known as the New Morality, is assigned to the project to provide spiritual guidance to the project’s staff—and to spy on the irreligious scientists who dare build a modern day Tower of Babel, using a barely legal variation of nanotechnology no less. Bracknell’s hubris angers the New Morality as well as the Yamagata Corporation. The Skytower will prove to be a much more efficient method for launching satellites into space, negating the need for propulsion systems provided by Yamagata.

When the tower is sabotaged by Yamagata, causing most of it to collapse and kill millions of people across the planet, Bracknell is charged, convicted and exiled from Earth for the rest of his days. Molina, seizing the opportunity to have Lara for himself, commits perjury and testifies against Bracknell. The use of nanotechnology in the Skytower also becomes inimical to Bracknell’s case.

Bracknell spends the next ten years living a meaningless life as a crewman aboard a freighter, plotting his revenge on Yamagata, Molina, and Danvers.

Bracknell eventually escapes servitude and has his appearance altered by a specialist at Selene base on Earth’s moon—ironically through the use of nanotechnology. He assumes the name of one of the freighter’s crewman who was killed when the ship was attacked and destroyed. Bracknell, now Dante Alexios, was the sole survivor and beneficiary of the insurance policy on the freighter. With new found fortune, Alexios sets up an engineering firm on the moon. Eventually, he learns of a project on Mercury to create solar powered satellites—funded by Yamagata Corporation. Alexios wins a bid as a subcontractor on the project, opening the door to his plan for revenge.

Mercury is divided into four parts and no chapter is more than three pages long. The first two parts deal with the Mercury project and introduce the main characters. The reader begins to understand just who Dante Alexios truly is and starts to watch the seeds of his vengeance bear fruit. Part three moves back in time to the Skytower project and the rise and fall of Mance Bracknell. The final part brings the reader back to Mercury and the final execution of Bracknell’s plan for revenge.

All told, Mercury is a fast, enjoyable read. I did note more than once that POV tends to jump from one character to another inside of a scene. I always found this to be a distraction and in fact, breaks an often taught rule of story structure. However, the POV changes are made clear so as not to confuse the reader.

Foundation and Chaos by Greg Bear is the middle installment in a trilogy of sequels to Isaac Asimov’s classic Foundation series. I completed Foundation and Chaos in a few weeks, reading mostly in the late evening or in stolen minutes during weekends and was eager to pick it up everyday and read for as long as possible with each session.

By contrast, I took months to finish the first book, Foundation’s Fear by Gregory Benford. Benford’s stultifying, tedious pacing and fragmented plot did not inspire confidence in the rest of the series but Greg Bear skillfully minimized Benford’s influence while maintaining continuity with Foundation’s Fear.

A well conceived plot, excellent pacing, strong character development, and sufficient political intrigue make for an engaging read. Bear tackled the robots of Asimov’s Galactic Empire head on and tied in references to the Second Foundation and the Encyclopedia Galatica nicely.

An excellent story based on Steven H. Wilson’s award winning original SF audio drama, The Arbiter Chronicles. Taken Liberty touches on religious beliefs, individual rights, freedom, sexual mores, and other cultural and social topics. The characters are diverse and well developed. This is science fiction at its best. More than a genre, SF is a premise that envelopes all genres where brillant moral tales can come alive. Steve Wilson makes that happen in Taken Liberty. You can listen to the Arbiter Chronicles at http://prometheusradiotheatre.com/arbiters.php