ome 100 years from now, the various nations of Earth are ruled by an assortment of theocracies: the New Morality in the United States, and elsewhere the Holy Disciples, the Light of Allah and the New Dao. These righteous, ultramoralistic politicians have succeeded in rescuing our world from 20th-century-style terrors and crises, scandals and shortages, but at a price. Scientists must practice their calling with one eye constantly cocked for censors and inquisitors. But the theocrats need science and its products for continued survival and prosperity. These demands include massive quantities of fusible material scooped from Jupiter itself, to power Earth's fusion reactors, thus explaining why Station Gold, the largest space station in the solar system, orbits that gas giant.
Grant Archer, a young graduate student hoping to pursue astronomy research on the moon's far side, is instead co-opted by the authorities to spy on Station Gold. Newly married, he goes reluctantly, leaving his wife behind, uncertain of his role and ignorant of his new environment and the secrets it contains. Once on Station Gold, Grant finds himself at the mercy of its capricious director, Dr. Wo. Wo is undertaking a secret mission to plumb Jupiter's seas--the level below the upper atmosphere, where the pressure from above and the heat from the planet's core balance to form a layer of water tinged with exotic compounds. Here strange life forms flourish, and Wo is convinced that alien intelligence also exists. The discovery of such would put a serious kink in the party line of the theocrats, who proclaim humanity the sole inheritor of God's creation.
Grant makes new friends and enemies on the station, and gradually exhibits talents that convince Wo to enlist the young man into his schemes. First, Grant occupies a place in Mission Control for the Jupiter expedition. But when one of the crew members of the advanced exploratory craft Zheng He dies, Grant himself is tapped as a substitute. Under the direction of an autocratic Captain Krebs--survivor of a failed previous mission, whose own legacy of physical problems thwart success--Grant and three companions finally penetrate far below the Jovian skies to encounter the majestic whale-like inhabitants who will fulfill Dr. Wo's hopes. But crisis after crisis--human and Jovian--nearly wrecks the expedition, with ultimate victory riding solely on Grant's inexperienced shoulders.
Hard SF to make Heinlein proud
There is a small but notable list of SF works dealing with Jupiter, the most impressive member of our solar system, from authors as diverse as Poul Anderson, Clifford Simak, John Varley and Arthur C. Clarke. But the flood of new data from various NASA probes to that region has yet to be fully digested or presented within SF in novel form. Until now, when Ben Bova delivers a meticulous and accurate presentation of just what might be found on that strange world, big enough to swallow all its sibling planets.
This kind of novel recalls the work of Heinlein in his Destination Moon mode, or Hal Clement in any number of stories: a day-after-tomorrow tale crafted with near-journalistic purity. In this vein, the author must strive to make planetary science understandable and palatable to the interested, educated layperson, dramatizing dry findings in a compelling narrative. All facts must be accurate, all speculations reasonable and likely, all actions and settings plausible. It's a difficult, demanding mode to pursue, and not many choose to nowadays. But Bova does it magnificently. In such chapters as "The Endless Sea," he conveys the sheer poetry of Jupiter without stinting on the scientific aspects, an endless rain of microscopic diamonds being just one startling and beautiful aspect of the conditions there. His guesses relating to what kind of life might inhabit Jupiter's oceans are well-reasoned, with his composite life form, the Leviathan--whose viewpoint we share in intermittent chapters--seeming both comprehensible and suitably odd.
Nor does Bova scant the human aspect of his tale. Among the cast, Grant and his compatriots exhibit the whole range of human emotions, from the treachery of the hidden religious zealot on Station Gold (a mystery Bova juggles well), to the fanaticism of Dr. Wo and Captain Krebs, to the irreverence of Egon Karlstad, the kindness of Lane O'Hara and the quiet scientific dedication of Zareb Muzowara. This latter figure, exhibiting in addition to his secular humanist creed a deep religious faith, shows Bova's evenhandedness regarding the opposing worldviews in his future. And Grant, though his original naive faith is shaken, emerges with a new grasp of how religion and science might coexist.
It's evidence of the slow, deliberate, educational pace at which Bova conducts his story that the actual descent into Jupiter's atmosphere doesn't occur until Book IV out of V, some 255 pages into the novel. But since the reader has been treated every step of the way to a vividly mimetic recreation of Grant Archer's daily life, the final big adventure arrives as a logical and earned culmination of Archer's work, not some melodramatic hook.
