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

Ugh

Even as a "Young Adult" novel, and I don't believe it is marked as such, this audible book is terrible. The female protagonist spends the entire story, a trip to Venus with a pilot and one, single anthropologist as company (so only three people total l, including her, on the ship - already the plot is unbelievable), to recover her adventurer Father lost some years earlier. Abd this woman, the lead protagonist, spends the entire novel wondering if the pilot want to bed her. Worse, this crew apparently did not think it necessary to train at all for this trip - every area of plot that could have been developed into a good story falls back on the worst kind of trite nonsense.

Couldn't finish it, too hard...

Ok

Decent story but the whole thing is a feminist novel. Constantly bringing up men and how chauvinist they are. It was annoying how often it was brought up. The story bounced around and left a lot of detail out on many aspects of the journey. All in all it was ok but I won’t be continuing the series if there is one.

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!!!

a juvie, too shallow

much too formulaic. bova was a great editor, but not that great of a fiction writer

A good listen

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

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.

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.

Not ok

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

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.

Don't waste your time

I can't believe that this was written by Bova and not some sixth grader