Doug Beason

Lame.

My standards for an action/adventure type of book like these are pretty low, and this one managed to sink lower. Completely implausible in way too many places to keep you in the story at all. A cast of cardboard cliché characters round it out.
Only the criminal's get-away plan was at all novel.

Guess I should have clued in when the reviews on the back were 'advance praise' - even their reactions likely would have been different if they'd been subjected to the full experience.… (more)

This near-future sci-fi terrorism thriller dives right into the action after just a bit of technical description to set the scene in the space station. The story is rich in these technical details, which helped me feel like I was right there. A couple of times the acronyms did get a little dense but those parts were short and didn’t interfere with my enjoyment of the book.

I liked that the main character Kimberly is a scientist and uses her ingenuity to devise means of self-defense and formulate countermoves in her struggle to thwart the terrorists’ plans. Suspense builds throughout the book as threat piles on threat, and the scenes have the feel of an exciting action-thriller movie. The fast-paced story drew me in and kept me reading as the clock ticked closer and closer to a disaster with the potential to kill millions – and Kimberly herself.

A very entertaining, diverting read!

(I received a free advance copy of this book with no obligation to post a review. The opinions in this review are my own. (Read June 2020.))… (more)

Bova and Beason forgot an important aspect: the best “centri-fungal” effect I've ever experienced was opening the shoes after that survival weekend without a shower.

The ISS is circa 400km above the Earth's surface, GPS satellites (for your satnav) fly in medium Earth orbit (MEO) at an altitude of just over 20,000 km, a geosynchronous satellite (fixed position overhead such as a TV satellite) is 35,000km and the moon 384,000km away. The higher the orbit, the 'closer' to the moon. Beyond the moon there the Lagrange point(s) where (L2) the James Webb telescope is intended.

Ferrets in a sack comes to mind ... where's the physics in contemporary SF?

I know you my dear reader do not like physics in contemporary SF but how about this?

1. Take a space and curve it;

2. Transport a vector round a loop in said space which gives a measure of the space:

3. Realize you can find a frame which looks locally Euclidean;

4. Do a little bit more maths;

5. Work out the Laplacian for the space;

6. Find out that a mass gives the space curvature;

7. Write down Einstein's field equations.

Hey presto! The above is confirmed by experiment. It seems impossible, and yet, it works. The scale of the information being processed is such a wildly improbably number that it seems magical. Well it is magic. Magic is what remains incomprehensible even once you know all the facts of how an event happened, in this case, sound does not propagate in vacuum, how signals travel in optical and electronic communications devices: The sum remains magical. Hence this feeling that science is the magic of these days. Right, that's just metaphysical rambling, just to say it's amazing to read a SF novel with Physics done right.

If you understood the above-mentioned, you will appreciate Beason’s and Bova’s book even though it’s a SFional thriller. On top of that, this novel fully shows that you only need two tools (*) in a dire emergency: WD-40 and Duct Tape:

If it doesn't move and should, use the WD-40;

If it shouldn't move and does, use the duct tape.

Bova and Beason novel is vintage SF with a great emphasis on Space Physics.

NB: Until we get rotating space stations represented in Arthur C. Clarke’s vision, then space stations will always be for short term visits only.

NB (*): Unfortunately, neither duct tape nor WD-40 conduct electricity efficiently to the point it would repair defunct power distribution electrics.



SF = Speculative Fiction.… (more)