Death Wave by Ben Bova
Cover art by John Harris
Published by Tor Books
Reviewed by Leigh Kimmel
This novel is the direct sequel of New Earth, in which Jordan Kell led an expedition to the impossible habitable planet of the Sirius system, discovered a community of astonishingly human people, and ferreted out the secret of their origin, in the process solving the puzzle of how ancient records should have described Sirius as red or ruddy in a period long after Sirius B had passed through its red giant phase and shrunk to a white dwarf. The novel ended happily, with the protagonist marrying the pretty woman and embarking on a mission to save humanity, and the galaxy, from the wave of deadly radiation pouring from the galactic core.
However, it was not the end of the story -- before any grand crusade can begin, there must be grassroots support for it. One ship alone cannot save the galaxy. It will take hundreds, even thousands of teams to hit even a fraction of the most promising planets, bringing them the screens that will protect their civilizations from those streams of energetic charged particles that are so inimical both to biological systems and electronics, threatening both biological and machine civilizations. And first Earth must be convinced that the matter is urgent, that all life matters, and that the time to act is now, not when Earth is immediately threatened.
Interestingly enough, the book does not begin with Jordan Bell and the lovely Aditi. Instead, we meet a trucker who's annoyed that he's stuck waiting at a closed road because of the famous space captain and his alien wife, and a cop who's annoyed at being stuck with the job of being a cop, closing roads for security reasons and having to bear the brunt of other people's displeasure. There's a lot of resentment here, and it really feels like it's standing in for a broad swath of the population who feel their lives have no real purpose, that they're slogging through make-work instead of doing meaningful tasks that accomplish something, and are looking for something to focus their anger upon.
When Jordan finally enters the picture, he has scant time for his sightseeing trip with Adita. Very aware of what is at stake, not just for humanity but also for the enormous numbers of intelligent species out there who are still struggling their way up the slow climb to industrial civilization and often have no concept of the disaster that is racing toward them, Jordan has a heart-to-heart talk with the leaders of the world government. He shows some video he was given by the Predecessors, the machine civilization that had begun this grand mission until they all wore out and became extinct for unexplained reasons. This contains images from a great number of probes, of civilizations overcome by the Death Wave, including the heartrending visuals of a species who look like puppies, all lying where they fell and slowly desiccating because even the decay bacteria were killed by the pulse of radiation.
Shortly thereafter, they are the subjects of an assassination attempt -- but there are some peculiarities about it that raise the question of whether it was real. Could it in fact be a ruse to frighten them into accepting protective custody, with the side effect of having their mobility and access to information limited in ways convenient to government officials hostile to the mission? However, it turns out that the Predecessor technology Aditi brought with her to have some surprising applications, which are not going to please anyone whose business is to control their access to information.
Meanwhile, the characters we met at the beginning are reappearing, becoming entangled with a street preacher who's more than he seems. Apparently he was originally set up as an agent provocateur to locate and sweep up troublemakers, but he's gone rogue.
This puts our various characters on a collision course, as Jordan escapes "protective custody" and appeals to a former crew member whose father can get him to an Indian reservation that may provide him a bit more safety. Unfortunately, this was one of the weakest parts of the novel for me, and particularly disappointing because Mr. Bova has shown that he can write the various indigenous nationalities of North America well, as witnessed by the Navajo protagonist of Mars Life. By contrast, the characters in this book are presented as very generic American Indians, with no clear vision of their specific traditions as a people.
Meanwhile, Aditi is being taken to an L5 habitat, presumably the better to isolate and control her under the guise of protecting her from the terrorists -- except it also makes it easier for a handsy character to hit on her. So Jordan heads up to it, hoping to rescue his wife from the creeper, only to head straight into collision with the agent provocateur and his useful idiots.
There is a happy ending, in which Jordan shows he understands when to press for justice, and when to argue for mercy -- and thus his worthiness of greater responsibility.
On the whole, it's a workmanlike continuation of what began in New Earth, and a setup for the following three books, which conclude that overall story arc. It's possible Mr. Bova might have intended to carry the storyline further, but sadly he died in 2021 of complications of COVID-19. While it's possible that he may have left notes suggesting how he might have extended the Star Quest sub-series further into the future, one still has the problem of finding a posthumous collaborator who has both the skills to write at the same level of technical expertise and the humility to be able to write another's world without injecting oneself.
Buy Death Wave from Amazon.com
Review posted March 31, 2022.
