Apes and Angels

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By Ben Bova

Publisher Description

Six-time Hugo Award winner Ben Bova chronicles the saga of humankind's expansion beyond the solar system in Apes and Angels, the second book of the Star Quest Trilogy which began with Death Wave.

Humankind headed out to the stars not for conquest, nor exploration, nor even for curiosity. Humans went to the stars in a desperate crusade to save intelligent life wherever they found it.

A wave of death is spreading through the Milky Way galaxy, an expanding sphere of lethal gamma radiation that erupted from the galaxy's core twenty-eight thousand years ago and now is approaching Earth's vicinity at the speed of light. Every world it touched was wiped clean of all life. But it’s possible to protect a planet from gamma radiation. Earth is safe.

Now, guided by the ancient intelligent machines called the Predecessors, men and women from Earth seek out those precious, rare worlds that harbor intelligent species, determined to save them from the doom that is hurtling toward them.

The crew of the Odysseus has arrived at Mithra Gamma, the third planet of the star Mithra, to protect the stone-age inhabitants from the Death Wave. But they’ll also have to protect themselves.

The Star Quest Trilogy
#1 Death Wave
#2 Apes and Angels

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

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9 Reviews

3.5

Marko P

Created 3 months ago

Vensy Krishna

Created over 1 year ago

Aspen

Created over 1 year ago

Graff Fuller

Created over 3 years ago

“3.5 Stars - this is a slightly better book than the previous book in this series (Death Wave). I enjoyed them both, but they both have flaws. I gave it 3.5 Stars, with a 3 Star Goodreads rating. This is NOT a direct sequel to the previous book, though it happens shortly (narrative wise) afterwards. This book has a completely different cast of characters. This is a Science Fiction book with a Space Opera specific genre...which deals with a lot of moral and ethical issues throughout the book. The previous novel, Death Wave was a Science Fiction book with a Thriller narrative. Throughout this book, I kept thinking about the Prime Directive, from Star Trek. Not even in Star Trek are they able to follow this as thoroughly as they should. Most all the captains and others have broken the Prime Directive to save a civilization. They always had their reasons, but it is a VERY high bar. WIthin this book, the main protagonist is fighting for the civilization that he has found. He is a "lone wolf", not really involved in the day to day discoveries upon the planets that they have been sent to. Their mission is to find a way to place protective machines in place on the the planets that inhabit intellegint lives (to protect them from the Gamma Rays that are going to destroy all life on these planets in the next 200-400 years. These scientists have a noble mission, but on each planet, our main protagonist (who is incredibly brilliant) is able to descover "something" new...and in doing so, becomes more cavalier and starts to take more risks. He starts to do things that are not moral or ethical under the directive that he's been given, but it is all for the greater good of the species...but since they are a pre-Warp society, they know NOTHING about anything outside their town or area that they live. It was frustrating to follow this story. I kept saying, "don't do that", but things just kept getting worse and worse, so that he'd HAVE to step in and do the thing that he wasn't suppose to do. Don't ask permission, but ask forgiveness. Ugh. By the end of the book, I was not sure that what they eventually did was actually good. I feel that they may have upset the "natural" balance that had been put into place. It will be interesting to see what the next book, Survival will have to say about this.”

Branden Witte

Created over 3 years ago

About Ben Bova

Ben Bova (1932-2020) was the author of more than a hundred works of science fact and fiction, including Able One, Transhuman, Orion, the Star Quest Trilogy, and the Grand Tour novels, including Titan, winner of John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel of the year. His many honors include the Isaac Asimov Memorial Award in 1996, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation in 2005, and the Robert A. Heinlein Award “for his outstanding body of work in the field of literature” in 2008.

Dr. Bova was President Emeritus of the National Space Society and a past president of Science Fiction Writers of America, and a former editor of Analog and former fiction editor of Omni. As an editor, he won science fiction’s Hugo Award six times. His writings predicted the Space Race of the 1960s, virtual reality, human cloning, the Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars), electronic book publishing, and much more.

In addition to his literary achievements, Bova worked for Project Vanguard, America’s first artificial satellite program, and for Avco Everett Research Laboratory, the company that created the heat shields for Apollo 11, helping the NASA astronauts land on the moon. He also taught science fiction at Harvard University and at New York City’s Hayden Planetarium and worked with such filmmakers as George Lucas and Gene Roddenberry.