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The second volume of the best stories from legendary hard science fiction writer Ben Bova, the creator of the New York Times best-selling Grand Tour science fiction series, a six-time Hugo award winner, and past president of the National Space Society. The stories included in this volume span the five decades of Bova's incandescent career at the center of science fiction and space advocacy. Here are tales of star-faring adventure, peril, and drama.

Exploring the boundaries of the genre, Bova not only writes of spaceships, aliens, and time travel in most of his titles, but also speculates on the beginnings of science fiction in “Scheherazade and the Storytellers,” as well as the morality of man in “The Angel’s Gift.” Stories such as “The Café Coup” and “We’ll Always Have Paris” dip into speculative historical fiction, asking questions about what would happen if someone could change history for the better. This expansive collection is a key addition for Bova fans and sci-fi lovers alike!

Master storyteller Ben Bova continues his multi-volume "Grand Tour" saga chronicling humanity's exploration of near space with Titan, a fast-paced thriller focused on the first manned mission to the Solar System's most intriguing world. Skillfully blending high drama, passionate characters, and daring speculation with the latest discoveries from the current Cassini/Huygens probe of Saturn's moon, Bova has crafted a heart-stopping tale of epic adventure on mankind's next frontier.

The surface of Venus is the most hellish place in the solar system, its ground hot enough to melt aluminum, its air pressure high enough to crush spacecraft landers like tin cans, its atmosphere a choking mix of poisonous gases. This is where the frail young Van Humphries must go—or die trying.

In the best-selling novels Venus and Jupiter, Ben Bova dramatized the latest discoveries about our own solar system in an epic tale of near-future exploration and development. Now Bova turns his attention to one of our system's greatest mysteries, Saturn.

Six years after the first manned Martian expedition, a second has been announced, this one motivated purely by its profitable potential. Half-Navajo geologist Jamie Waterman, a veteran of the first mission, feels his conflicted soul beckoning him back to the eerie, unforgiving planet. As commander of the new exploratory team, he will have to contend with a bitter and destructive rivalry, a disturbing new emotional attraction, and deadly, incomprehensible "accidents" that appear to be sabotage.

On a privately financed orbital habitat above the planet Uranus, political idealism conflicts with pragmatic - and illegal - methods of financing. Add a scientist who has funding to launch a probe deep into Uranus‘ ocean depths to search for signs of life, and you have a three-way struggle for control. Humans can’t live on the gas giants, making instead a life in orbit. Kyle Umber, a religious idealist, has built Haven, a sanctuary above the distant planet Uranus.

Despite Mercury's desolateness, there are still those who hope to find diamonds in the rough. Saito Yamagata thinks Mercury's position will make it an ideal orbit point for satellites that could someday create enough power to propel starships into deep space.

This fourth volume of Favorite Science Fiction Stories contains 22 more gripping tales.

When Kell and his team return to Earth many years after their departure, they find that their world has changed almost beyond recognition. Not only has a second wave of greenhouse flooding caused sea levels to rise, but society has been changed by the consequences of the climate shift. Few people want to face Jordan Kell's news. He must convince Earth's new rulers that the human race is in danger of extinction unless it acts to forestall the death wave coming from the galaxy's heart.

This volume is the definitive collection of the best science fiction novellas published between 1929 and 1964, containing 11 great classics. No anthology better captures the birth of science fiction as a literary field. Published in 1973 to honor stories that had appeared before the institution of the Nebula Awards, The Science Fiction Hall of Fame introduced tens of thousands to the wonders of science fiction and was a favorite of libraries across the country.

In a startling future that's coming closer every year, Chet Kinsman is an astronaut ace who has done everything one can in space - including commit the first murder. It's a secret he can never escape, not even on the moon, where he's head of the first U.S. lunar colony. A series of shocking yet strangely inevitable circumstances will force Kinsman to confront his hidden past and decide Earth's destiny. In a desperate countdown to nuclear annihilation, Kinsman will struggle against a deadly dilemma: if he rescues the world, he risks destroying himself.

With the Death Wave no longer a threat to humanity, humans have spread out and colonized all the worlds of the solar system. The technology of the Predecessors has made Earth a paradise, at least on the surface. But a policy of exiling discontented young people to the outer planets and asteroid mines has led to a deep divide between the new worlds and the homeworld, and those tensions are about to explode into open war.

When the spaceship Viking encounters a variety of adversaries in the Asteroid Belt - including a prospector and his family, a cyborg, the solar system's greatest sculptor, and an evil industrialist - a confrontation begins that transforms the human solar system.

A new installment in the military science-fiction series by a Hugo Award-winner finds the superhuman, outer-space warrior John O'Ryan caught in the middle of a dangerous contest between a goddess and a god.

At the end of the Cretaceous Period, Earth is in the grip of the dinosaurs. Their leader is a reptile, worshipped by the Egyptians as a powerful god for thousands of years. His mission is to destroy the Creators - Orion's masters - and rule the planet.

A hero without peer or scruples, Sam Gunn has a nose for trouble, money, and women, though not necessarily in that order. A man with the ego (and stature) of a Napoleon, the business acumen of a P. T. Barnum, and the raging hormones of a teenage boy, Sam is the finest astronaut NASA ever trained and dumped. But more than money, more than women, Sam Gunn loves justice—and he really does love money and women.

John O'Ryan is Orion - more than human, less than a god, cast away on the seas of Time to do battle among the Creators for the future of mankind. Now the eternal warrior finds himself separated from his great love, Anya, and marooned in Macedonia under the reign of Phillip - fighting alongside the young Alexander, and at the mercy of a Queen Olympias who is far more than she seems.