Farside, Ben Bova
Farside, Ben Bova
2 Rating(s)
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Farside

Author: Ben Bova

Narrator: Stefan Rudnicki

Unabridged: 19 hr 18 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 02/12/2013

Categories: Fiction, Science Fiction

Synopsis

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 show whether or not the planet is truly like Earthand if it bears life. Farside observatory will have 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 Earths radio chatter by a thousand kilometers of the moons solid body. Building Farside is a complex, often dangerous task. On the airless surface of the moon, under constant bombardment by hard radiation and infalling micrometeoroids, builders must work in cumbersome spacesuits and use robotic machines as much as possible. Breakdownsmechanical and emotionalare commonplace. Accidents happen, some of them fatal. But what they ultimately find will stun everyone, and the human race will never be the same.

About Ben Bova

Ben Bova is the author of more than a hundred works of science fact and fiction, including Able One, Leviathans of Jupiter, and the Grand Tour novels, including Titan, winner of John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel of the year. He received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation in 2005, and in 2008 he won the Robert A. Heinlein Award "for his outstanding body of work in the field of literature." He is 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. Dr. Bova's writings have predicted the Space Race of the 1960s, virtual reality, human cloning, the Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars), electronic book publishing, and much more. He lives in Florida.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Crooky

I gave this book one more star than I think it ought to deserve, simply due to the interesting scientific concepts presented. The story itself isn't particularly good though. The characters are extremely one dimensional... insultingly so in some cases. As others have pointed out, there are some lazy......more

Goodreads review by Mark

It’s been a while since I read, never mind reviewed, any of Dr. Bova’s novels. In fact, the last one I reviewed was the Ben Gunn anthology, The Sam Gunn Omnibus (2007) back in, erm… 2007. So what do we have here, eight years on? For those who don’t know, for over two decades Ben has been creating his......more

Goodreads review by Kris

This hard SF novel about building 100-meter size telescopes on the far side of the Moon caught my attention. I'm an astronomer so I enjoyed the astronomy and the mirror and telescope construction. Bova's thorough research into telescope mirror construction shows. The characters were cardboard, and e......more

Goodreads review by Clark

Farside is another very good science fiction novel by Ben Bova, a six-time Hugo-Award winner. This novel takes place on the Moon, where a huge state-of-the-art optical interferometer telescope is being built on the farside of the Moon, i.e., the side that always faces toward outer space and never to......more

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