Kinsman

Kinsman #1

by Ben Bova

Fixup of the following stories:
Zero Gee (1972)
Test in Orbit (1965)
Fifteen Miles (1967)
Build Me a Mountain (1974)
The Lieutenant and the Folksinger (1978)

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction

280 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1979

About the author

Ben Bova was born on November 8, 1932 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In 1953, while attending Temple University, he married Rosa Cucinotta, they had a son and a daughter. He would later divorce Rosa in 1974. In that same year he married Barbara Berson Rose.

Bova was an avid fencer and organized Avco Everett's fencing club. He was an environmentalist, but rejected Luddism.

Bova was a technical writer for Project Vanguard and later for Avco Everett in the 1960s when they did research in lasers and fluid dynamics. It was there that he met Arthur R. Kantrowitz later of the Foresight Institute.

In 1971 he became editor of Analog Science Fiction after John W. Campbell's death. After leaving Analog, he went on to edit Omni during 1978-1982.

In 1974 he wrote the screenplay for an episode of the children's science fiction television series Land of the Lost entitled "The Search".

Bova was the science advisor for the failed television series The Starlost, leaving in disgust after the airing of the first episode. His novel The Starcrossed was loosely based on his experiences and featured a thinly veiled characterization of his friend and colleague Harlan Ellison. He dedicated the novel to "Cordwainer Bird", the pen name Harlan Ellison uses when he does not want to be associated with a television or film project.

Bova was the President Emeritus of the National Space Society and a past President of Science-fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA).

Bova went back to school in the 1980s, earning an M.A. in communications in 1987 and a Ph.D. in 1996.

Bova has drawn on these meetings and experiences to create fact and fiction writings rich with references to spaceflight, lasers, artificial hearts, nanotechnology, environmentalism, fencing and martial arts, photography and artists.

Bova was the author of over a hundred and fifteen books, non-fiction as well as science fiction. In 2000, he was the Author Guest of Honor at the 58th World Science Fiction Convention (Chicon 2000).

Hollywood has started to take an interest in Bova's works once again, in addition to his wealth of knowledge about science and what the future may look like. In 2007, he was hired as a consultant by both Stuber/Parent Productions to provide insight into what the world is to look like in the near future for their upcoming film "Repossession Mambo" (released as "Repo Men") starring Jude Law and Forest Whitaker and by Silver Pictures in which he provided consulting services on the feature adaptation of Richard Morgan's "Altered Carbon".

http://us.macmillan.com/author/benbova

Reviews

[Wyatt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Solid book by Ben Bova. I love the way he writes and the characters he develops. I was hoping this was going to be more set in space and the relationships between countries developing there like it was in the first third of the book and less about Kinsman dealing with his PTSD. However, while it was not what I was expecting or hoping for (thus the 3 stars) the book was still excellently written and had a wonderful look into the intensity of those traumatizing moments.

[Cathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

The fact that Bova predicted as much technology as he did is wonderful. Overall a very good read, but too much blasphemy for my taste.

[Selena · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5

sexist man discovers empathy and colonizes the moon

[فرهاد ذکاوت · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.6/5

[Wayne Kearney · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is considered a great SciFi classic, but I found it tedious and boring. There was more character development and inner turmoil than in the usual scifi, but in the end I didn't care. I had no interest in the characters by the end of the book, which I feel is a failure of the author. The technology was also very dated and tended to trip me up a bit. This was written at the very beginning of the Space Shuttle program and would have been very interesting at that point, but now it just seems hackneyed and off-putting. There are sequels to this book, but I have no intention of reading them. I would not recommend this book.

[Fredrick Danysh · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a novel of attempts to settle on the moon. Chet Kinsman was a Quaker who joined the Air Force in an attempt to venture into space. Despite his peace-loving religion, he becomes the first man to kill another in space.

[Erik Graff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bova's Kinsman stories are exceptional in terms of their relevance to geopolitics at the time of their composition, his protagonist a sympathetic figure.

[Andy]

1ST BRITISH EDITION. EX -LIB.

[Cazzaman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read this as title "Millenium"

[Samuel Lubell · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is hard science fiction that has become alternate history as the future didn't play out the way Bova imagined -- good in that there is no Soviet Union, bad in that space exploration hasn't happened the way it should have been. This book has much more characterization than most hard science fiction as Kinsman, who grew up a Quaker and at first seems like a Top Gun style good-old-boy pilot, has to come to terms with what he did to a Russian cosmonaut and then sacrifice everything, even friendship and the woman he loves, to achieve his dream of a moonbase.