Average

Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?

Not especially.

Did the narration match the pace of the story?

No, there were too many narrators. It became confusing.

Any additional comments?

Jupiter is an excellent novel, one of Bova's best, but the follow up, Levianths of Jupiter is poorly executed. Which is a shame.

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Not As Good As "Jupiter"

Having read and enjoyed the forerunner to this story I selected "leviathans
of Jupiter" as my next read so that I could find out more about the
mysterious creatures we encountered in that first story, "Jupiter". I was
also wanting to see how the main character in the prequel, Grant Archer had
got on and so I looked forward to this book despite the generally
unfavourable reviews I had read.

In summary, I found the novel not quite as good as the first story and I put
this down largely to some of the characters. As I have said in my previous
reviews, Bova has a somewhat hit and miss record when it comes to getting
his characters right and he has got some misses here. However, what I think
was the worst aspect of the book and one I've seen repeated on several other
Bova stories is the multi-narrator format. In my view this type of format
doesn't work or perhaps I should say that it might work better if the choice
of narrators was better. Stefan Rudnicki did his usual competent job of
narration but alas his contributions were minimal. The first English
accented female narrator we hear in the story that describes Jupiter to the
listener tends to have a tone in her voice as if she's relating the
narrative to a group of 10 year olds sat in class which was slightly
irritating. There is another English accented female that does the majority
of the Catherine Westfall character and she does the Australian accent
perfectly. However, she does a an almost pantomime rendition of all male
characters in an over attempt to compensate for a deeper male voice.

The narrator that performs the "D" character was OK but when she spoke the
lines of the Corvis or Yeager characters she tended to sort of do it as if
they were almost shouting or were exclaiming everything. The fewest
contributions were by another American accented female who largely spoke the
Linda character and her voice was awful. Grating and nasal sounding it
really was so bad it left me reducing audio volume as she spoke.

I get the aim of doing this narration approach as it supposedly allows
better distinction between the main characters by having different speakers
voice their parts but to me it undermines the series continuity of having a
single narrator in the form of Rudnicki. Also, I found that when two
narrators had to voice the same character at times that accents used were
different. Catherine Westfall for example was clearly meant to be an
Australian but one narrator made her sound more English. A middle eastern
character was made to sound somewhere between Irish and Jamaican by one
female speaker. Stefan Rudnicki is far better at multiple accents than the
other narrators featured and so should've just narrated the entire book as
he did with the prequel story, Jupiter and many others in the Bova series of
books.

That Bova trait of getting characters so wrong occurred with the Catherine
Westfall antagonist. It surprises me that someone so fundamentally flawed
and petty could be in such a position of authority. Her motivations were
like that of a grasping child and frankly were just silly.

After reading the first book featuring Grant Archer I was expecting to see
him figure a lot more in this story but alas he was really a minor player.
This tale centers around a new group of people with Archer as station
director largely on the fringes.

I do like the way that the Deidre or "D" character came to know her new
friends along the way as she travelled to the station but I noticed what
appears to me to be an error in the writing as we hear mention of Yeager /
Max as a character in a scene where "D" is sat with Corvis before the Max
Yeager character is even introduced.

For some inexplicable reason the orbiting research station apparently is at
one-sixth Earth gravity and I'm sure it was at a full Earth gravity in the
previous story. Why a rotating station should be at much less than Earth
standard gravity seems another of those non-sensicall things Bova does at
times. No mention is made either of how a Lunar gravity that is so much
lower than Earth normal affects the dolphins which are present on that
station and recently brought there from a standard gravity environment.

As another reviewer mentioned, we don't get into the Jovian ocean until
around hour 12 of the story. I didn't find this so much of a problem myself
as the rest of the story from that point is all pretty much taking place in
the ocean with the Leviathans.

The book finally explores new aspects to the Leviathans and their
interaction with the humans trying to make contact with them. Bova has some
interesting concepts here as to how the Leviathans communicate and their
social structure and also makes the more unusual and interesting point that
an alien species may communicate and think at a vastly different speed to
ourselves which isn't often postulated in science-fiction.

Bova's depiction of the cybernetic character, Dorn, is rather dated and
crude in that he has a half metal body and thus sounds akin to the sorts of
cyborg we saw on shows like Buck Rogers in the 25th Century back in the
1980's. This is where Bova seems to lack sophistication in his vision of
technology in the future especially when you consider when the book was
written.

For me this story wasn't as enjoyable as the first based around Jupiter and
possibly this was largely down to the multi-narrator format. However, the
way the characters were written was also the reason. In the latter stages of
the book the "D" character is heard more than once saying things like "Oh,
why does my chest hurt so much. Oh yes, it's the pressure.". This sort of
over exposition also lends an air of more pulp science fiction to Bova's
novels which is something I remarked upon in my review of "Jupiter". In
addition, the way the Corvis and "D" characters end up together just seems
so simplistic and cheesy like an old Mills & Boon story.

Not as good a read as the prequel "Jupiter" and the narration format was
something I didn't much like but the pay off to a large degree is the
contact with the Leviathans toward the end of the book. This alone went a
long way to satisfying my curiosity about these creatures which was worth the
read.

Not one of Bova's best but worth a listen if you've read "Jupiter".

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1 person found this helpful

Too many different narrators

Uses too many narrators, so has about 4 or 5 voices for the same character.
This detracts from the story rather than adding anything.

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Don’t bother

Boring story. Disliked the multiple narrators. One in particular irritated me intensely. Not Ben Bova’s finest hour.

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Sorry, but.......

A ripping yarn totally ruined by some truly dreadful narration. What a shame.
A good job it was an 'Included' title.

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Was this young adult fare?

Ben Bova is pretty bad but this is just terrible, made even worse by bad narration and topped off with random multiple narrators. Skip this one.

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