The Precipice, Ben Bova
The Precipice, Ben Bova
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The Precipice
A Novel

Author: Ben Bova

Narrator: Scott Brick, Amanda Karr

Unabridged: 12 hr 24 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 02/01/2005

Synopsis

The first novel of the Asteroid Wars about earth's near future from the "leading light of hard Science Fiction and space advocacy"*
Once, Dan Randolph was one of the richest men on Earth. Now the planet is spiralling into environmental disaster, with floods and earthquakes destroying the lives of millions. Martin Humphries, fabulously wealthy heir of the Humphries Trust, also knows that space-based industry is the way of the future. But unlike Randolph he does not care if Earth perishes in the process. As Randolph—accompanied by two brilliant women astronauts—flies out to the Asteroid Belt aboard a fusion-propelled spacecraft, Humphries makes his move. The future of mankind lies in Randolph's hands.

*Booklist

About Ben Bova

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.

About Scott Brick

Scott Brick first began narrating audiobooks in 2000, and after recording almost 400 titles in five years, AudioFile magazine named Brick a Golden Voice and “one of the fastest-rising stars in the audiobook galaxy.” He has read a number of titles in Frank Herbert’s bestselling Dune series, and he won the 2003 Science Fiction Audie Award for Dune: The Butlerian Jihad. Brick has narrated for many popular authors, including Michael Pollan, Joseph Finder, Tom Clancy, and Ayn Rand. He has also won over 40 AudioFile Earphones Awards and the AudioFile award for Best Voice in Mystery and Suspense 2011. In 2007, Brick was named Publishers Weekly’s Narrator of the Year. Brick has performed on film, television and radio. He appeared on stage throughout the United States in productions of Cyrano, Hamlet, Macbeth and other plays. In addition to his acting work, Brick choreographs fight sequences, and was a combatant in films including Romeo and Juliet, The Fantasticks and Robin Hood: Men in Tights. He has also been hired by Morgan Freeman to write the screenplay adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama.

About Amanda Karr

Amanda Karr is an award-winning actress and director. In addition to television appearances on The Guardian and Days of Our Lives, Amanda has played Zelda Fitzgerald in the critically acclaimed musical Tender. On audio, she can be heard as the voice of Ender's cyber-friend, Jane, and as Pancho Lane in Ben Bova's Planet series.

Reviews

AudiobooksNow review by Dutch on 2007-04-14 20:00:13

If you don't mind listening to 10 disks of narration only to find that you are no more than half way through the story, you might enjoy this one. This book practically has a 'to be continued' sign at the end of the last disk. The hero is dead and nothing is resolved. It probably deserves only two stars, but I have to admit that I did get caught up in it enough to want to find out what happens in the end - and I still want to find out what will happen in the end. Since BookFree will probably send you several other books before they send you Volume II and several more before Volume III (or, even worse, they may send them out of order which would ruin it) I would urge you to stay away from this trilogy. Another oddity: there are 3 narrators, but they're not ***igned certain voices, they just take turns at reading the chapters, so the same character is heard with three very different versions of a Texas accent.

Goodreads review by Paul on June 30, 2024

Mankind on the brink! With the mindless inevitability and unstoppable madness of a great mass of migratory lemmings, mankind is hurtling over a metaphorical precipice. Global warming and climatic change has driven humanity to the brink of extinction. The greenhouse effect has taken hold, icecaps are......more

Goodreads review by Dirk on May 01, 2024

The Grand Tour novels are a (fairly) near future series dealing with the expansion of humanity into (and eventually further than) the solar system. They don’t appear to have been written in chronological order. At the time of my writing this, some of them are very hard to come by in hardcopy format......more

Goodreads review by AndrewP on December 29, 2017

Book #8 of The Grand Tour and #1 of the Asteroid Wars sub series. In this book Dan Randolph has an ambitious plan to save his company and provide needed resources to the failing planet Earth. Unfortunately he doesn't have the capital to finance the project himself and has to form an alliance with an......more

Goodreads review by John on April 08, 2015

The Precipice (2001) 422 pages by Ben Bova Bova gives a glimpse of Earth in a post global greenhouse era. Ocean levels have risen, etc. After that most of the book is set in space including the moon colony Selene. Dan Randolf is the major owner of Astro maunfacuturing a company on its last legs if it......more

Goodreads review by Tom on January 10, 2025

This was my second Ben Bova book. I did not like it as much as Venus, but it was still an excellent read. Really interesting characters. I read in Venus about this Lars Fuchs character who I thought was fascinating. This book goes back to an earlier time in his development as a character. These book......more

Quotes

“Bova gets better and better, combining plausible science with increasingly complex fiction.” —Los Angeles Daily News on The Precipice

“Stefan Rudnicki, producer and one of the performers, has picked his readers well. Each scene generally concentrates on one of the lead characters, so Rudnicki assigns a particular reader to a particular character throughout the book. The technique works.” —AudioFile on The Precipice

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