Challenges

Bova offers a new collection of wide-ranging science fiction stories, essays about the onrushing future, and observations about the craft of SF itself.

Included - among others - are such tales as the touching "The Man Who Hated Gravity," the satirical "Crisis of the Month" and "Fitting Suits," rigorously hard SF like "To Touch a Star," and wrenching drama like "Answer, Please Answer" and "Brothers." Framing all the stories are Bova's insights into the challenges posed in the writing of each one, a vade mecum of home truths about the science in SF, trusting one's own instincts, writing what you know, dealing with publishers, generating plots, creating sympathetic characters, and getting the job done. Also included is a remarkable pair of pieces, one a speculative essay about the world of fifty years hence ("2042: A Cautiously Pessimistic View") and the other a novella, Thy Kingdom Come, set in the world outlined in that essay and dramatizing its problems and opportunities.

Finally, Challenges also presents a generous selection of Bova's output as an essayist both in and outside the SF field, such pieces as "Will Writing Survive?," "Science in Science Fiction," "What Works for Me - And What I Work For," "John Campbell and the Modern SF Idiom," and his resounding affirmation of humanistic rationalism, "Science, Fiction and Faith."

Any collection of Ben Bova's fiction would be cause for celebration. With its generous helping of Bova's comments - particular, provocative, and deeply practical - on the SF field itself and the real future into which we are all embarked, Challenges is an even more special book for SF readers, aspiring writers, and anyone interested in where the human race is headed at the end of the twentieth century