Privateers

A rather hard book to get through. It's dated in all the worst ways, but perhaps not in the most atrocious. The hardest part is the plot. The worldbuilding is merely a cold-war what-if with Soviets as the winners and holding economic dominance over everyone, with our MC from the first Grand Tour boo......more

This book was written in 1985 and its storyline is the beginning of what would later become Bova's Grand Tour series of books on planetary exploration. The book was written during the Cold War and as such, the Soviet Union is the adversary. The U.S. and its allies have lost the Cold War and the Sovi......more

This is kind of an alternate book set at the beginning of the Grand Tour series. In this one the Russians are the overall bad guys and that reflects the time period when this was written .i.e. Cold War 1985, seven years before the next Grand Tour book, Mars (1992). Ben Bova subsequently went back a......more

Beginning of Dan Randolph mission to break the eastern giants to make America again (written in 1984). First half of the book is a young adult (kind of failure). I do not understand that much accusation against Ben Bova. We are living in a very sensitive world created by bastards exactly like charac......more

I'll give this four stars. An interesting book, and a bit of an orphan when it comes to Bova's Grand Tour. Written in the 1980's and published in 1985 during the height of the cold war the book depicts a world in which the Soviet Union won the Cold War forcing the nations of earth to abandon their s......more