Farside by Ben Bova
Cover art by John Harris
Published by Tor Books
Reviewed by Leigh Kimmel
This is a book about which I feel intensely ambivalent, and in many ways rather frustrated. After reading and enjoying Mars Life, and recognizing this volume as belonging to the same continuity as it, I'd expected a similarly compelling read.
Unfortunately, I found this novel disappointing in comparison. Perhaps if I hadn't come to it with Expectations based on the other novel, I would've enjoyed it more. But I found the characters and storyline rather lackluster -- and the blurb did not help, having apparently been written by a publicist who at most skimmed the book and misunderstood several key characters' backstories and situations.
No, Grant is not Moon-born -- he's from South Africa, and got into a bad situation there which led him to flee to the Moon and find work there. He can't go back to Earth, but it's for political reasons, not medical.
And Ulrich's issues revolve a lot more around survivor guilt for the young graduate student who died in the laboratory accident that destroyed his eyesight. Something that could've been a lot more interesting if it had been developed the way DiNardo's need to understand why God allowed the Martians to be made extinct drove his character in Mars Life.
Even the nanomachines don't seem that interesting in the first half of the novel. It's only in the last third or so, when it becomes clear that Farside base has been seeded with rogue disassemblers intended to target a certain metal alloy used in a lot of lunar equipment, that the story really picks up urgency and I felt compelled to read through to the end and find out what was going to happen with it. Until that point, I set the book aside for extended periods and felt no great urgency to return to it, even when I didn't have pressing business to take care of.
This is a real shame, because the storyline should've been one that would've excited me. This is the story of building three giant telescopes on the far side of the Moon, the sort of venture that I remember reading speculations about in non-fiction books of the 1950's like Lester Del Rey's Man's Reach Into Space, which had lingered on the shelves of my school library for the simple reason that the district was too poor to weed out dated materials and replace them with books that had been written after the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions were history.
I still remember my excitement when I read Robert A Heinlein's Have Spacesuit -- Will Travel, which included a moonbase and at least some suggestion of efforts to build installations on Farside to take advantage of its shielding from terrestrial lighting and radio noise. Excitement that I carried with me through the long years when NASA went in circles, continuing to fly the Space Shuttle orbiters long after it became clear they would never achieve their reusability goals, simply because it was politically impossible to start designing a new generation of spacecraft until the problem reached a crisis level. So of course I always have a soft place in my heart for stories of people living and working on the Moon, not just in the Golden Age dreams of writers who didn't realize just how hard it is to live and work in space, but also in the work of contemporary authors drawing on what we know now about the lunar working environment.
I'm thinking that what this novel is missing is something similar to the tension between the New Morality's and DiNardo's views of how science relates to God, which brought a profound philosophical aspect to Mars Life. Does God want our cringing fear and obedience, or our excited awe? Does God want us to fear scientific knowledge as something that trespasses against His authority, or to seek it out as another way of knowing Him and appreciating His wondrous creation?
Which is sad, because the mysterious planet our protagonists are trying to image could've been the gateway to just those sorts of questions. And the added philosophical dimension would've given the book a lot more depth, at least for me as a reader.
Review posted June 18, 2019.
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