Millennium by Ben Bova

First published in 1976; published digitally by Endeavour Press/Venture Press on June 19, 2016

The prolific Ben Bova wrote four novels featuring Chet Kinsman (and eventually combined two of them into a fifth novel). Millennium (1976) is the second of those, although the first, published in 1967, has little in common with the next three. The title has been released in digital format by Endeavour in the UK.

In Millennium, Kinsman is stationed on the moon, where Russians and Americans occupy separate but neighboring bases that are known collectively as Selene. Kinsman, in fact, is the military commander of the American base. His superiors think he is too cozy with the Russians and therefore unreliable, so they send Frank Colt to keep an eye on him.

Novels have to be read in the context of their time (it isn’t fair to judge a 1976 novel by 2016 standards) but even with that in mind, I didn’t buy the character of Frank Colt. He represents a stereotypical view of the Militant Black Man, exemplified by his inexplicable hostility to characters he calls “whitey.” Colt flip-flops in his allegiances throughout the novel, rather too easily and conveniently to make him a convincing character.

The novel’s paranoid view of Russia and a heated-up Cold War is more forgivable, given the political climate of the time, but readers in the current century should be aware that the story will seem dated. As you would expect, the technology is wrong (the USA and Russia have a moon base by 1999 but they are still using the kind of computer terminals that are now found in museums). The political reality at the end of the 20th century was also far removed from the future that Bova envisioned. But this is a work of fiction, and not making an accurate prediction of the future is not a reason to criticize the book (in retrospect, after all, a reader can make the inaccurate predictions unimportant by viewing this as an alternate history). Still, the sense of reading a dated novel is stronger here than it is when reading some other older works of sf.

On Earth, nasty Russians are shooting down America’s ABM “Star Wars” satellites faster that replacements can be launched and faster than America is shooting down Russia’s ABM satellites. The puzzled president -- Bova makes him a bit soft-headed, easily manipulated by his hawkish military advisers -- doesn’t understand that America is in an undeclared war. The military wants to take steps that would probably lead to actual war while assuring the president that war isn’t an inevitable outcome of blowing a manned Russian command center out of the sky. Yeah, right. Kinsman knows better.

Kinsman decides to lead a revolution that will turn Selene into an independent nation, but Heinlein already did that in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, so Bova had to tell a similar story in a different way. He does that with reasonable success. While Heinlein premised his revolution on his trademark libertarian perspective, Bova’s revolution is based both on utopianism (one world, make war no more) and practicality (if nations of the Earth destroy each other, who will be left to ship food to the moon?). Both are interesting, but Millennium still feels like a shadow of Heinlein’s novel. It is nevertheless a good story. It’s not Bova’s best, but it is better than his most recent work.

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