Am I the only one in the world who loves Ben Bova books? I just can't get enough of his sci-fi works! Just finished reading Death Dream, yet another excellent book... but the point is, am I the only one that reads them?
Why ask in TV and Media instead of Science Fiction? You might get more answers there. I read a fair number of Bova's books thirty years or so ago, The Dueling Machine and some of the Kinsman stuff, among a few others, but for some reason I lost interest. Bova's stuff was pretty conventional and MOR compared to a lot of the other stuff I was reading at the time (Lovecraft, Dick, Vance, Moorcock, Leiber, etc, and then the whole cyberpunk thing not too many years later) which may be the main reason why I lost track of his stuff. Looking at wiki, I see he didn't do a lot in the early '80s, which was also a likely factor -- and I think the last thing I read was an omnibus of the Exiles trilogy, which I remember being unblown away by.
My very first science fiction book (or adult novel for that matter) was Orion. I really want to reread it since I first read it about 10 years ago. I really like Mars, Return to Mars, and Jupiter. Some other stuff I've read include Exiled From Earth, Flight of Exiles, Star Watchman, Kinsman, Millennium, and the Winds of Altair. My favorite book from him happens to be As On a Darkling Plain though. Top notch stuff when I first read it. Not sure how it would hold up now.
I've read Mars, and remember it not at all. I've also read Triumph, his alt-history World War II novel, which I found uninteresting. That's it for my encounters with Ben Bova.
I'm a fan of his earlier stuff. I really love Mars and I think that's his best. Pretty realistic portrayal of what a Mars mission would be like. I'd like to see that made into a movie, but the closest we got so far was the Race to Mars mini-series we got from the Discovery Channel. I find he started going downhill when he expanded too much on his own universe stuff by adding too many factions I felt detracted rather than added to his stories. From then on, his stories revolved more about his characters than the planets they were set on which I felt missed the point. The one that really pissed me off about this was Mercury. Mercury itself only had passing mention, once or twice in a few pages, and because of it could of been set anywhere, and the book focused more on a space elevator thing on Earth. With Mars, what worked for me was that it was more or less the characters vs the harsh environment. You didn't really have enemies other than the Earth government, and the characters having tension with each other. Future novels such as Venus and Mercury felt more undistinct and rather ordinary. I haven't read Return to Mars yet, but I picked that up and Mars Life (his newest book) this summer and I'm looking forward to them. Also loved The Dueling Machine. Great setup, and has a similar concept to Holodecks, written in 1978.