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Tales Of The Grand Tour by Ben Bova
01/05/2005 . Source: Donna Jones 
pub: TOR. 379 page hardback. Price: $24.95 (US), $34.95 (CAN). ISBN: 0-765-30722-7. Buy from Amazon US - Buy from Amazon UK
nb: US titles may only be available from Amazon US, and UK titles from Amazon UK. check out website: www.tor.com and www.benbova.net
Ben Bova has written about the lives of those brave enough to explore the vast expanses of space. Over fifteen years, he has written about life on Mars, Venus, Jupiter and Saturn. The people, though, have always stayed at the heart of his writing. Their love, determination and beliefs have all featured in his Science Fiction epics.
Those that have read these works have come to fondly know them as something more, they are Ben Bova's 'Tales Of The Grand Tour'. In this anthology, the author combines short tie-in titles and long excerpts from the series.
I've never dipped into Bova's vast series and this seemed like the perfect way to find out before getting into a novel-length book, just what all the attention was over. The anthology crosses paths with well-known characters in Bova's cast, Sam Gunn and Jamie Waterman to name just two.
I found the very first short an uphill struggle, mainly because it was written in the gum-shoe detective style which I have always had no interest in. But I decided that was a one-off and to keep on plugging away.
Other authors, in varying genres, have this same heartfelt style as Bova, exposing humanity and his storytelling through the medium of character-based foundations. It is the type of writing that can lead to emotive composition and, in a small proportion of the stories, it worked for me as a reader. 'Muzhestvo', in particular, was effective in its build up and worked as a short piece of work.
However, in other stories it felt like the actual genre fell away and that I had stumbled into a contemporary work of fiction. 'Monster Slayer' fell foul to this by taking a construction worker out of the Earth-bound construction of high rise to the space building of floating habitats. The main character finds himself addicted to drugs and then, in a fit of cold turkey, he rescues a fellow worker in a terrible space accident. I didn't get a feel for the depth of what the main protagonist was going through. The prose skimmed the cream off the top and left it to one side. The title really hyped the overall storyline far too much, in the end leaving me cold.
The last story 'Leviathan', which centres upon a vast creature that lives on Jupiter could have been something of a flagship for the book. The different technique of exploring a life so alien to ours and requiring imaginative scene structure should have been gripping but in the end it became dull in the first few paragraphs.
Each piece of writing is set up by a short introduction of sometimes the location's elements and sometimes a little background on the character. In one introduction, Bova explains how he has written about global warming before it has been found in reality to be fact.
I get a feeling from the way in which these stories and also the book as a whole has been presented that this may be a way of getting more book sales of the longer works rather than an anthology of Bova's work in its own right.
This may well be classic Science Fiction at its best but, for me, I was vastly disappointed.
Donna Jones
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