Book Review: The Precipice: Book One of the Asteroid Wars by Ben Bova

Book Review of The Precipice: Book One of the Asteroid Wars by Ben Bova


Other Worlds' Rating: 3 of 10 stars

Dan Randolph is the head of Astro Manufacturing. The Earth has just suffered a major global disaster - a giant greenhouse effect is causing a total restructuring of climates around the globe, and melting ice caps are causing catastrophic flooding in major coastal cities. In the midst of all this, a rival of Dan Randolph, Martin Humphreys, approaches him with a new idea - mine the asteroid belts using ships powered by experimental rockets to get the resources that Earth so desperately needs. Randolph is all about saving the earth, Humphreys is all about pulling a profit.

This book really had potential. It started off fairly strong, and seemed to have a great premise. However, this didn't last long. The characters soon became static, and there were several groups that served as "strawmen" for the characters to bash on - namely, several religious groups that were doing things that no religious group in their right minds would do. The religious groups were always getting in the way of progress, and always refused to see reason, etc. etc. etc. Honestly, it started to get to the point that I found this rather tiresome. As I mentioned, the characters were static - the good guys were good, the bad guys were bad, and the scoundrels were scoundrels...no one was changing, no one was having to take a major look inside to challenge their own beliefs, etc. It seemed as though this book were written for the sole purpose that the author thought that a fusion propelled rocket was a cool idea.

On top of these problems, the plot was extremely slow. It dragged horribly. While once again, the start was strong, and moved a little faster, soon the pace of the book leveled off into a tortoise-like crawl. I gave this book 3 stars because of the strong start, but that was about the only redeeming thing I found about it. I also found that the frequent swearing in the book was a nuisance.

I can't in good conscience recommend this book to anyone. I think that there are much stronger reads out there.