Neptune

The Outer Planets Trilogy, Book 2

By: Ben Bova

Narrated by: Gabrielle de Cuir

Length: 8 hrs and 30 mins

Publisher's summary

Hugo Award winner Ben Bova continues his grand tour of the human-settled solar system with a look at life in the outer planets, among the moons of Neptune.

In the future, humanity has spread throughout the solar system, on planets and moons once visited only by robots or explored at a distance by far-voyaging spacecraft. No matter how hostile or welcoming the environment, mankind has forged a path and found a home.

In the far reaches of the solar system, the outer planets - billions of miles from Earth, unknown for millennia - are being settled. Neptune, the ice giant, is swathed in clouds of hydrogen, helium, and methane and circled by rings of rock and dust. Three years ago, Ilona Magyr’s father, Miklos, disappeared while exploring the seas of Neptune. Everyone believes he is dead - crushed, frozen, or boiled alive in Neptune’s turbulent seas.

With legendary space explorer Derek Humbolt piloting her ship and planetary scientist Jan Meitner guiding the search, Ilona Magyr knows she will find her father - alive - on Neptune.

Her plans are irrevocably altered when she and her team discover the wreckage of an alien ship deep in Neptune’s ocean, a discovery that changes humanity’s understanding of its future...and its past.

©2021 Ben Bova (P)2021 Blackstone Publishing

A good listen

Enjoyed the listen, the series has been very entertaining. I look forward to the next book.

A little choppy but solid

So this book is a bit choppy. It takes a few leaps without adequately explaining. Perhaps some of the leaps were explained in book 1?? I disagree with reviews saying its a feminist book. I believe that criticism is unwarranted. One of the characters is a misogynistic man and the story is told from the woman's perspective. She HAS to say how she feels.

Is it a great book, no. Is it a good book that had me wanting to read book 3, YES!!!

Reviews

I wish people wouldn’t be so critical, and expressing their views so hard that what they say that’s go with the book. My opinion.

Spoiler-free, but...

The poison. The poison for Kuzco. The poison formulated especially for Kuzco. The writer who is paid by the word. My only complaint, I promise. Loving the Grand Tour.

Not ok

Too much romance and not near enough science fiction. This is a romance novel hiding out in the science fiction section.

I kept waiting for it to get good

While the narration is top notch, the story is quite dull. I hung in there till the bitter end hoping it would get good, but alas, no.

Worst book ever!

I honestly didn't like it. Horrible, poorly resolved, superficial characters. The story has a logic, but the development of it is very poorly done. This character all the time mourning his dead father for who knows how many years, how unbearable!
I finished the book to see if at least at the end I was surprised by an intelligent denouement that made me forget about the suffering of the rest. Did not happen.

This book was free, and it wasn't worth the money

I've heard good things about Ben Bova, but I've never read any of his work. When Audible offered this book for free, I took them up on it, even though I knew that it was the second book in a series. That might have been a mistake.

This book was bad. The story was boring, slow moving, and made no sense. (Spoiler Alert - if you doubt the evidence found by a crew on a mission, you don't send them back a second time to find more of the same evidence. You send a different set of people to verify what the first crew found.) Even during the dangerous, suspenseful parts, i never felt like the characters were in danger. All of the "perils" they faced felt more like inconveniences. And it took them forever to figure out how to get out of "danger" when the solutions were obvious to the reader.

There is one HUGE conclusion that the book jumped to that made no sense to me, regarding something that happened on the planet Uranus. I realized that it must have been explained in the first book. I wish Bova had just added a couple of paragraphs to bridge that knowledge gap.

The interpersonal stories between the shipmates are shallow and seemingly pointless. The main character has suspicions about whether another character can be trusted, but that never gets resolved. And the book ends with a bit of a cliffhanger. It feels like the whole book was intended to get you from "Uranus" to whatever the third book is, which made me wonder why Audible chose to offer this one for free. I'm guessing it's because it was selling so poorly. If it was to introduce new readers to Bova's work, all it did was convince me to stay away from this author.

Not his best work.

Expected more from this great author.
Storyline is insipid and predictable, characters maudlin, ending shopworn and melodramatic.

Juvenile and suited for adolescent readers

While I have enjoyed many of Bova’s works in the past, I found this story a start departure from his previous style. If it weren’t labeled as such, I would assume this was ghost, written by a completely different author.

The characters’ behavior is puerile and not at all what you would expect future society space explores to behave like I found the narrator‘s delivery - like many new or inexperienced narrators – to be a bit over the top, gushing, and exaggerated much of the time