{"id":1608,"date":"2016-01-27T07:01:09","date_gmt":"2016-01-27T07:01:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.ackgame.com\/onwords\/?p=1608"},"modified":"2016-01-27T07:01:09","modified_gmt":"2016-01-27T07:01:09","slug":"venus-by-ben-bova","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.ackgame.com\/onwords\/venus-by-ben-bova\/","title":{"rendered":"<em>Venus<\/em> by Ben Bova"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/book\/show\/9402589-venus\" style=\"float: left; padding-right: 20px\"><img decoding=\"async\" border=\"0\" alt=\"Venus\" src=\"https:\/\/d.gr-assets.com\/books\/1348391479m\/9402589.jpg\" \/><\/a><a href=\"https:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/book\/show\/9402589-venus\">Venus<\/a> by <a href=\"https:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/author\/show\/12407.Ben_Bova\">Ben Bova<\/a><br \/>\nMy rating: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/review\/show\/1527046170\">4 of 5 stars<\/a><\/p>\n<p><em>Venus<\/em> is my type of science fiction &#8211; more science and less fiction. Of course it is an adventure thriller, and the story line includes some impossibilities, but there is also a lot of hard science in there. It is set in future, a hundred years or so, when men have industrialized the asteroid belt and set up colonies on the moon and Mars. Venus, however, has never been explored by &#8220;boots on the ground.&#8221; Van Humphries, the unlikely hero of the story, sets out to be the first, in order to recover the body of his brother who preceded him in an ill-fated attempt to explore our nearest planetary neighbor. Of course there is a beautiful young female scientist on board &#8230;<\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;re not careful you&#8217;ll end up learning a lot of actual facts about Venus while you are caught up in the drama of the tale. Van has a competitor, a mortal enemy of his father, the zillionaire who set the reward. The human story is riveting but I think you will enjoy the drama of the science, the excitement that NASA and the world enjoys when a real space mission goes well and we learn all kinds of new things. The prose is clear and easily understood, although the author overuses the word clamber and has a couple of other annoying idiosyncrasies. The narrator is very good for the audiobook.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/review\/list\/12975428-russell-atkinson\">View all my reviews<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Venus by Ben Bova My rating: 4 of 5 stars Venus is my type of science fiction &#8211; more science and less fiction. Of course it is an adventure thriller, and the story line includes some impossibilities, but there is also a lot of hard science in there. It is set in future, a hundred [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1608","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Venus by Ben Bova - OnWords<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blog.ackgame.com\/onwords\/venus-by-ben-bova\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Venus by Ben Bova - OnWords\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Venus by Ben Bova My rating: 4 of 5 stars Venus is my type of science fiction &#8211; more science and less fiction. 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