Tales of the Grand Tour » (First Edition)

A six-time winner of the Hugo Award, a former editor of Analog, former editorial director of Omni, and past president of the National Space Society and the Science Fiction Writers of America, Ben Bova is the author of more than a hundred works of science fact and fiction. He lives in Florida.

New tales of humanity's near-future exploration of the Solar System, from a science fiction master

The New York Times

The pieces collected here include excerpts from the novels as well as short stories on related themes. While their science is up to date, their narrative and stylistic strategies are comfortably old-fashioned. Not for Bova the ambiguities and excesses of cyberpunk rage, nanotech noodling or quantum weirdness. His characters resemble elements in the periodic table, clearly defined by a few well-chosen traits; even their life-changing epiphanies are carefully flagged and thoroughly explained: ''Like two kindred souls, like comrades who had shared the sight of death, like mother and son they walked up the tunnel toward the waiting race of humanity.''

Reading Bova, you are always aware of solid ground beneath your feet -- even when the protagonist is an alien life-form swimming in Jupiter's world-girdling, 5,000-kilometer-deep ocean. — Gerald Jonas