‘Survival’ is the fourth installment in a series of novels from six-time nebula award winning author Ben Bova. The series began with ‘New Earth’ where a human starship encounters a machine intelligence that calls itself ‘The Predecessors’. The machines inform the human crew that a ‘Death Wave’ of gamma radiation is spreading out from the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy that will destroy all life on the planets in our galactic neighborhood.
The Predecessors want to make a deal with humanity. They will give us the technology to survive the death wave if we agree to spread that technology to other intelligent species that are also threatened. In the second novel ‘Death Wave’ the crew returns to Earth and succeeds in convincing humanity to undertake this task, see my post of 31 May 2017.
The third novel ‘Apes and Angels’, see my post of 31Mar 2018, tells the story of one such expedition to save an intelligent, albeit primitive alien lifeform. In the latest installment ‘Survival’ the crew of the starship Intrepid undertake a 2,000 year long journey, the crew is in suspended animation, to a star system inhabited by another machine intelligence.
If you think about it, with this Death Wave idea Ben Bova has created for himself a fictional Universe that can support any number of novels. A human starship travels to a distant star, has whatever adventure Bova has thought of and so long as he can loosely connect it to the Death Wave concept it fits into the series.
The main plot in ‘Survival’ concerns the way the machines treat their human visitors. They don’t need the human’s help in surviving the Death Wave and the machines don’t really trust organic life to begin with. “Organic life is ephemeral,” the crew of the Intrepid is told several times, “Only machines are immortal.”
There are a couple of subplots in ‘Survival’ as well, one being the way that successful scientists often wind up becoming administrators who no longer have the time to do any research. The second is buried kind of deep but you catch it by the end, it’s the simple question of which is the better survival strategy, competition or cooperation?
If all of these concepts sound familiar to you maybe it’s because they’ve been storylines in science fiction for decades now, the old Star Trek TV shows did versions of all of them.
Indeed ‘Survival’ does have a Star Trek sort of feel about it, although without any of the action sequences. In fact there is little of anything that could be called action in ‘Survival’ and maybe that’s a good thing. Right now it seems as if SF novels are just full of violence, the last four novels I’ve reviewed all have a significant amount of murder and mayhem in them. (See my posts of 25Nov2018, Freefall; 12Dec2018 Planetfall; 13Feb2019, One Way and 3Apr2019, The Children of Time)
So an SF novel that succeeds, that makes you think without anybody getting killed is a nice breath of fresh air. It’s easy to use SF as just an excuse for a variant on a cowboy story with ray guns in place of six shooters and starships in place of wagon trains but the best Science Fiction is about thinking, not shooting!