Survival by Ben Bova
Cover art by John Harris
Published by Tor Books
Reviewed by Leigh Kimmel
When I first saw this book on the shelves at our library, I assumed from the cover design that it was part of the Grand Tour series, along with Farside and Mars Life. However, when I started reading it, I could see no obvious connection: while those two novels were set clearly within our Solar System and had the feel of near-term hard sf, with nothing that couldn't be directly extrapolated from existing space technologies, this novel took place much further in the future and dealt with interstellar travel and machine civilizations. As a result, I assumed that it must belong to another series, and be several books in to judge by the dust jacket copy, but for some reason is given the same cover design as the Grand Tour books.
As it turns out, this sequence is in fact part of the Grand Tour series -- just much further down the timeline than any of the works I'd read previously. Unlike a more typical series, the novels in the Grand Tour are not nearly so tightly connected to one another, and because they are generally each complete unto themselves, they can be read in pretty much any order.
As the title suggests, this novel centers on issues of survival, both of the individual and the species. It begins with a prolog in which the protagonist is the captain of a Bussard ramjet heading to a distant star (think the technology in the early parts of Larry Niven's Known Space universe, before the First Man-Kzin War and the purchase of a hyperdrive manual from the mysterious cryogenic aliens known as the Outsiders). Alexander Ignatiev is contemplating his life choices and the opportunities he had to forego when a problem develops -- the starship is moving into a region of space with very little hydrogen. The ship's AI directs the awake crew to go into hibernation until the spaceship reaches a region with more hydrogen -- but Ignatiev can see that the cryosleep capsules will fail and all the passengers and crew will die before the ship reaches that region. He cannot get the AI to diverge from its course, and doesn't know nearly enough about programming to alter it, so he has to find a way to outwit the AI and force it to allow a more suitable course.
After that demonstration of human flexibility vs. AI rigidity, we get to the real meat of the story. It takes place some centuries later, thanks to relativistic time dilation and anti-agathic medicine. Ignatiev is now commanding a new crew on a new spaceship, on a mission of mercy to a world imperiled by the Death Wave racing outward from an explosion in the galactic core (here again we have an obvious Known Space comparison, to the wave of charged particles that the Puppeteers are fleeing by taking their homeward and its five agro-worlds on a billion-year trek to the rim of the galaxy and beyond). According to earlier surveys, the planet is supposed to have a thriving machine civilization, and Ignatiev and his new crew are supposed to deliver and install a system of screens that will help protect these cyber-folk's vital electronics from being fried by those charged particles streaming outward from the galactic core.
However, when the Intrepid arrives, they discover nothing but heavily eroded ruins. Could some disaster in the interim have destroyed what had been a thriving civilization?
Just as they're beginning to mourn the lost civilization and lost opportunity, they discover that the surface ruins are in fact a maskirovka, and the machine-folk are in fact very much a going concern, hidden away underground. At first our human protagonists rejoice to know that they will have a chance to save yet another civilization. But there's something strange going on, keeping their spaceship from sending messages back to Earth. The machine-folk's ambassador provides evasive answers, and it becomes increasingly obvious that the machine civilization has no intention of ever letting them leave, or even contact Earth again.
Meanwhile, trouble is brewing within the crew, as Ignatiev is pushed aside and another executive begins to take leadership. However, this individual has some serious obsessions that are interfering with his ability to lead effectively, and when other crew members object, he only doubles down, seeing it as rebellion against his authority.
Ignatiev has to find a way to simultaneously dislodge this individual from the levers of authority and find a way to convince the machine civilization that no, humanity does not pose an existential threat to them, and in fact cooperation between biological and machine civilizations can produce a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.
While this book is complete in itself, and provides a satisfying read without needing to have read any of the preceding volumes in the Grand Tour series, there are broad hints that Ignatiev has had an important role in some of the earlier books. As a result, I definitely want to go back and re-read those books as well and see how this one fits into the larger tapestry.
Also, there's one very amusing element in the beginning for me. In the prologue, one of Ignatiev's crew members is named Vartan Gregorian. For most readers, it would just be an Armenian name, but I keep wondering the author chose that name as a deliberate Tuckerization of the former chief librarian of the New York Public Library, or if he just chose it as a cool-sounding name without knowing anything about the Primary World person to whom it belongs.
Buy Survival from Amazon.com
Review posted April 12, 2012.
