Sam Gunn Jr.
By Ben Bova
Blackstone Publishing, 2022

The much-lauded science fiction author Ben Bova wrote more than one hundred books in his long career. He won six Hugo Awards and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation, and he served as president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Right up until very shortly before his death in late 2020, he was a familiar and smiling presence at conventions and sci-fi gatherings. 

All of that can sometimes make it pleasantly possible to overlook the fact that he was at best a mediocre writer, and that’s nothing new: it’s with such mortar that many a giant literary career is built and fixed in place. Between the barely-restrained ferocity of science fiction’s most innovative, challenging authors and the hot-buttered popcorn schlock of the genre’s forest floor, Bova charted a middle path of genial, moderately-researched, interesting yarns that featured ray guns and alien worlds only because it was such things, and not jodhpurs or six guns, that first captured his boyish heart. 

Such careers tend to have two things in common: they’re remembered fondly, and they don’t usually outlive their authors by very long. In the benighted 21st century, we can add a third: they can be seen as commodities rather than artistic records – things that should be extended rather than commemorated. 

Hence, maybe, this new title from Blackstone Publishing: Sam Gunn, Jr. Long-time readers of Bova’s enormous body of work will recognize the name of Sam Gunn, the interplanetary adventurer and ladies man who featured in a few of Bova’s merrier fictional outings. In this new book, roistering old Sam is dead – his corpse is found on Page 1 – but lo, a new generation is waiting in the wings, a strapping young man whose dying mother tells him he is, in fact, the great man’s son. 

He promptly goes to the headquarters of Sam Gunn Enterprises and eventually has a confrontation with one of Sam Gunn’s closest allies. It reads, for good or ill, like everything else Bova wrote:

Leaning back in his swivel chair, Malone said, “Okay, prove you’re Sam’s kid.”

“My mother told me. On her deathbed.”

Malone grunted, unimpressed. But he said, “You look kinda like Sam. If those freckles don’t scrub off. Too damned tall, though.”

“My mother was almost my own height. She was an actress, years ago. A dancer, really. When she met my father.”

“You got his hair, sure enough.”

Unconsciously smoothing his unruly red mop, Junior said, “My mother wouldn’t lie to me. Especially not on her deathbed.”

“Yeah, it’s a heart-wrenching story. I’ve heard a dozen of ‘em, so far.” 

“This one is true!”

Malone pushed himself to his feet once more. Junior saw that it seemed to take him a considerable effort.

As he edged slowly, deliberately, around the desk he crooked a finger and said, “Come on, kid. We’re gonna see if you’re telling the truth or not.”

Junior shot to his feet. 

“I got a sample of Sam’s blood in storage. We’ll compare yours with his.”

“Good,” said Junior.

It’s undeniably grueling stuff, and it’s made all the more horrifying by the fact that it happens well along into the book, not, as it should have, around Page 3. Sam Gunn, Jr. is every bit as laconic and flat and unmemorable as any other piece of Bova’s writing – which is one of the most uncanny and oddly reassuring elements of this book, since any sane person would otherwise assume that of course this book had been cobbled together by somebody, anybody other than Bova, who died long enough ago to make the existence of any hitherto undiscovered complete manuscript howlingly unlikely. Sam Gunn, Jr. is episodic, comfortable, and completely uncompelling – typical Bova, in other words, so likely this is indeed his work. And the folks at Blackstone have given it an intentionally anachronistic presentation, with the US cover showing a rocketship flying past a ringed world. 

A further discovered manuscript will seem completely unlikely, no matter how authentically pedestrian it is. So we shall see if this is indeed a last visit with the master.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. He’s a books columnist for the Bedford Times Press and the Books editor of Big Canoe News in Georgia, and his website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.