www.msereno1970.com Male, 39, Married. Ivrea, Italy

Earth is an overpopulated planet where billions are dying of starvation because of wars, famines and natural disasters.
The salvation for human race is emigration to Earth-like planets around other stars….
But Earth-like planets are rare and many of them have first to be terraformed....
Windsong, the sixth planet of the Altair system is one of them....
....but Altair VI is a hellish place where huge 'werecats' and other big animals roams: working on the surface is so big a risk...

People sent to tame this new world have to face the dire straits of such a challenge and strive also with the zealotry (as well as greed) of the Church of Nirvan.....

The novel is typical of Ben Bova, with an ending a little different from expected....

The idea behind the book is, as always with Bova’s works, truly fantastic. Anyway I only ranked the novel as three stars out of four because of a certain lack of details in the personality of the main characters.

I’m a passionate fan of Bova's works and this lack appears to me as really disappointing especially when comparing these (rather shallow) characters with the ones depicted in other truly remarkable novels such as Moonrise and Moonwar!

‘Blackman’ is a hard-boiled detective story that takes place a century from now, in a future different from the one depicted in Takeshi Kovacs trilogy....

What we are, like we act, what we do and accomplish in our lifetime is due to the capabilities we acquires from the culture we were born and soaked or it is related to our genes and we can’t do anything to change our “wiring”.
This is the main theme of the book. Morgan gives us his answer with a truly remarkable and riveting book.

Not an easy writing, especially at the beginning, when the author is binding together the different parts of the storyline. But it you are patient and endure the effort of surviving the first chapters you’ll be rewarded with an awesome SF novel.

...the fabric Bova's novels are made with is being stretched too much and begins to tear apart.

As for Terry Brooks (who merged the ‘Knight of the Word’ series with ‘Shannara’) Ben Bova is doing pretty much the same with ‘Voyagers’ and ‘The Grand Tour’.

The novel deals with former 20th century Astronaut Keith Stoner, now endowed with the god-like powers he owes to the alien technology he and his family are able to master, meets with the characters of the Grand Tour Novels at the end of the 21st century.
But this is no longer the world Keith and his family left more than a century before.

Even though the “trick” Bova uses to mix the two different storylines is kind of remarkable this new book appears to me as not as exciting as the previous novels of both the series.

There is lack of action: all along the novel almost nothing happens, furthermore some characters are just sketched leaving the reader with the feeling that something during the reading is missing.

The end of the book leaves (would you expect anything else?) some room for a further sequel…..

Money is money, no surprise, but I’d rather prefer to read something new from Bova genius…..

Ringil is a gay hero that survives telling story of his past battles in exchange of board and lodging in a small village Inn.

Archeth is a lesbian half blood virago, that lives at the court of the emperor

Egar is a former mercenary from the steppe and also an outcast Clan Chief.

With this three characters Morgan destroys the classical cliches of fantasy genre creating a new astounding novel in the fashion of his previous SF works!!

By far the better fantasy novel I've read in the last years!!

P.S.
When Ringil asks about the origin of dwenda's powers he gets a typical SF answer.... just a few words....
is this simply a joke by Morgan or something more?
I hope we'll find it in the upcoming second book of the trilogy