Titan: A Tale of Cataclysmic Discovery

The voice talents were exceptional. I've heard them before reading other books and was impressed. However, this book was so awful, even they couldn't save it. It was painful just getting through to the end.

Bova tries to intersperse some political intrigue, so of course the women are pitted against the men in a women's rights issue. Did the "women's issue" have to be "having babies?" Talk about cliche! Bova also expresses his complete lack of understanding about astronauts & mission planning. A pilot who forgets to put on her space suit for a flight? Please!

The characters in this book were all so alike that I couldn't tell who was with whom, or which character was speaking because they all thought the same way. I'd like to say the characters were 2 dimensional, but juvenile is more like it. The robot is the only interesting or stable character in the entire book.

If this is one of Ben Bova's best works, I will skip the rest. I couldn't even get halfway through this book, I got so fed-up with all the focus on who was dating whom and who was wearing what to the ball and how much weight whomever had lost and how. At least the first half of the book is severly lacking in sci-fi elements. I got to the point where I didn't even care about the probe anymore, I was so sick of wading through all the high-school drama. Reads like Cosmopolitan magazine in space.

I like sci-fi, but this was more like Dallas in Space than anything else. I've never read Bova before, but I was expecting more from the futuristic space genre than this. The narration is almost unbearable. Four different readers switching off, mostly depending on who's point-of-view is being expressed. They all "performed" replete with accents that were inconsistent depending on who was reading. The story lost me about 1/4 in but I stayed with it almost until the end when I realized it was time to move on.

I guess I grew up reading Ben Bova over the years (the Dueling Machine early on through Mars and Return to Mars later on), so I've always liked his slow paced, realistic writing style that puts character development in front of action.

Titan is as good as any of those books and very well narrated, too. I saw there seemed a lot of negative reviews, but Ben Bova doesn't write pulp fiction. He writes hard science fiction.

This was a good book.

I felt like I was reading a Soap Opera disguised as a sci fi novel...there really is not much action in this novel or any real protagonist/antagonist conflict...and the characters are rather one dimensional....the hokey accents of the reader did not help, either. Seems like the author tried too hard to make a book with a strong female characters and forgot to add aspects of true intrigue. Very little time was spent discussing the most interesting character in the book, the title character -- Titan.

Sorry, but I would rather listen to paint dry. This book should be 'bad sex in space', and the accents and characters are right out of the bronx. Some of the narrators are ok, but most are a laugh.

Bova wrote this and many other books as excuses for taking the real scientific data for the planets and giving it to us in the form of a story... it is interesting insofar as you like astronomy and planetary physics... as a story it is pretty much fluff... some angsty characters, a mysterious robot gone awol... and a dash of interstellar politics. Nothing dumb, nothing offensive, but also nothing to write home about. The readers on the other hand, are terrible... sounding like a bunch of WASPy actors trying to play ethnic types. The dialects come and go, depending on how tired the readers are, and they try so hard to inflect the voices with character and pizazz that they do a disservice to the simplicity of the tale. Read this if you like hard sci-fi stories about terraforming/space exploration, but don't expect Red Mars (Robinson). It's no where near that complex.

The voice talents were exceptional. I've heard them before reading other books and was impressed. However, this book was so awful, even they couldn't save it. It was painful just getting through to the end.

Bova tries to intersperse some political intrigue, so of course the women are pitted against the men in a women's rights issue. Did the "women's issue" have to be "having babies?" Talk about cliche! Bova also expresses his complete lack of understanding about astronauts & mission planning. A pilot who forgets to put on her space suit for a flight? Please!

The characters in this book were all so alike that I couldn't tell who was with whom, or which character was speaking because they all thought the same way. I'd like to say the characters were 2 dimensional, but juvenile is more like it. The robot is the only interesting or stable character in the entire book.

Welcome back Poncho Lane in this installment of the Grand Tour.
Dare Devil do and a probe gone awry set the background of this adventure. The attempt to probe Titan's surface has gone bad and humans are outlawed to touch the surface, how do you repair the probe and not touch the ground? fast paced and well developed story and characters make this book a great listen.

My favorite of the Grand Tour series, and I love them all. Great narrator, thank heavens he has done most of Bova's books. This book has more stuff happening in it than you can shake a stick at. I never wanted it to end, I just wanted it to go on and on forever. I wanted to be there!