Farside - (Grand Tour) by Ben Bova (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Six-time Hugo-Award winner Ben Bova presents Farside.

Farside, the side of the Moon that never faces Earth, is the ideal location for an astronomical observatory. It is also the setting for a tangled web of politics, personal ambition, love, jealousy, and murder.

Telescopes on Earth have detected an Earth-sized planet circling a star some thirty light-years away. Now the race is on to get pictures of that distant world, photographs and spectra that will show whether or not the planet is truly like Earth, and if it bears life.

Farside will include the largest optical telescope in the solar system as well as a vast array of radio antennas, the most sensitive radio telescope possible, insulated from the interference of Earth's radio chatter by a thousand kilometers of the Moon's solid body.

Building the Farside observatory is a complex, often dangerous task. On the airless surface of the Moon, under constant bombardment of hard radiation and infalling micrometeoroids, builders must work in cumbersome spacesuits and use robotic machines as much as possible. Breakdowns--mechanical and emotional--are commonplace. Accidents happen, some of them fatal.

What they find stuns everyone, and the human race will never be the same.

"Bova's latest novel is one of his best, and a classic use of the old sf theme of humanity reaching out for immortality among the stars."--Booklist (starred review) on Farside

Review Quotes

"Bova's latest novel is one of his best, and a classic use of the old sf theme of humanity reaching out for immortality among the stars." --Booklist (starred review) on Farside

"The sort of gritty, hands-on, you-are-there yarn at which Bova has long excelled." --Kirkus Reviews on Farside

"With his customary use of scientific facts to augment his flair for storytelling, Bova brings to life another sf adventure about humanity's future in space." --Library Journal on Farside

"Bova's fans and hard SF lovers should flock to his latest novel." --Library Journal on Leviathans of Jupiter

"A quick-paced space adventure." --Publishers Weekly on Leviathans of Jupiter

About the Author

Ben Bova (1932-2020) was the author of more than a hundred works of science fact and fiction, including Able One, Transhuman, Orion, the Star Quest Trilogy, and the Grand Tour novels, including Titan, winner of John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel of the year. His many honors include the Isaac Asimov Memorial Award in 1996, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation in 2005, and the Robert A. Heinlein Award "for his outstanding body of work in the field of literature" in 2008.

Dr. Bova was President Emeritus of the National Space Society and a past president of Science Fiction Writers of America, and a former editor of Analog and former fiction editor of Omni. As an editor, he won science fiction's Hugo Award six times. His writings predicted the Space Race of the 1960s, virtual reality, human cloning, the Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars), electronic book publishing, and much more.

In addition to his literary achievements, Bova worked for Project Vanguard, America's first artificial satellite program, and for Avco Everett Research Laboratory, the company that created the heat shields for Apollo 11, helping the NASA astronauts land on the moon. He also taught science fiction at Harvard University and at New York City's Hayden Planetarium and worked with such filmmakers as George Lucas and Gene Roddenberry.