A new science fiction novel by a six-time Hugo Award winner
Farside, the side of the Moon that never faces Earth, is the ideal location for an astronomical observatory. It is also the setting for a tangled web of politics, personal ambition, love, jealousy, and murder.
Telescopes on Earth have detected an Earth-sized planet circling a star some thirty light-years away. Now the race is on to get pictures of that distant world, photographs and spectra that will show whether or not the planet is truly like Earth, and if it bears life.
Farside will include the largest optical telescope in the solar system as well as a vast array of radio antennas, the most sensitive radio telescope possible, insulated from the interference of Earth’s radio chatter by a thousand kilometers of the Moon’s solid body.
Building the Farside observatory is a complex, often dangerous task. On the airless surface of the Moon, under constant bombardment of hard radiation and infalling micrometeoroids, builders must work in cumbersome spacesuits and use robotic machines as much as possible. Breakdowns — mechanical and emotional — are commonplace. Accidents happen, some of them fatal.
What they find stuns everyone, and the human race will never be the same.
Start a new discussion about this book | Show all topics |
The author of more than 100 futuristic novels and nonfiction books, Dr. Ben Bova has been involved in science and high technology since the very beginnings of the space age.
President Emeritus of the National Space Society and a past president of Science Fiction Writers of America, Dr. Bova received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation in 2005, "for fueling mankind's imagination regarding the wonders of outer space."
His 2006 novel TITAN received the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel of the year. Earlier, he was an award-winning editor of ANALOG and OMNI and an executive in the aerospace industry.
Dr. Bova is a frequent commentator on radio and television and popular lecturer.