When business tycoon Martin Humphries offers a fortune to the first person to travel to Venus to recover the remains of his son Alex, lost on the planet two years earlier, two men take him up on his offer. One is his frail second son Van; the other is his rival and greatest enemy. Bova's latest novel not only captures the alien and hostile Venusian atmosphere but also manages to tell a top-notch adventure story of broken dreams and lifelong hatreds that match the turbulence of Venus itself.

This is another one of those books that's hung around on my shelves, unread, for a long, long time, so I think it's time for it to go out into the world and hopefully find another home.

WILD RELEASE NOTES:

Released as part of the "Never Judge A Book By Its Cover" challenge. Week 41's theme is "astronomy".

Happy reading!

The first science fiction I've read in a long time and it took me back to why I read so much of it when I was a teen ager. The novel has a lot of fascinating planetary (Venus of course) science and a complexly, but credibly worked out descent to the surface and return to orbit. And of course there's plenty of melodrama along the way. Bova knows how to tell a story.