Ben

September 1, 2019

Stars, Won’t You Hide Me (Review)

nother short story (from the Catastrophies collection), this time from 1966 by Ben Bova (back from when most of your weren’t even sperms nor eggs, and I (kiddies) was a potential-loaded kid of eight). It’s a great short piece that really catches the scifi theme of distance and time. We start with Holman, a fellow wired up to a damaged star ship, racing away from the debacle of a battle where Humanity just lost to the Others. All we know about the Others is that they skirmished with humans once, put us back into the stone age, capped us with […]
November 15, 2020

The Long Fall (Review)

’m currently plowing through a large 1907 drama, at lease a week out on that one. As a side-issue, I’ve been reading The Sam Gunn Omnibus, a huge collection of Ben Bova stories about his spaceman hero, Sam Gunn. I don’t think I’ve ever read any of these (or I may have in some long-forgotten collection perhaps). Either way, the stories are great – short and sweet and funny. So Sam Gunn is an astronaut. Unlike your usual hero, Sam is short, not that handsome, and loud. He’s just a bit of a nutball poised in the position to be […]
December 13, 2020

Diamond Sam (Review)

ince I’m still deep in another book, I met this week’s deadline by peeking into the next story in my Sam Gunn Omnibus, a collection by the recently-late Ben Bova. This time, it was Diamond Sam. So the collection continues with Jade, a young girl attempting to make a historical drama out of the late, great Sam Gunn, spaceman and adventurer. In this, she interviews Grigory Protov, an aging cosmonaut living out his last days in a Russian old-spaceman-home on the moon. And Grigory has nothing good to say about Sam, calling him a spy and a thief. Turns out […]