Source: Slashdot
Article note: Aw. I really enjoyed his Grand Tour books. I didn't know he was still producing them into last year.
Ben Bova "was the author of more than 120 works of science fact and fiction," according to Wikipedia, and was also a six-time winner of the Hugo Award. "He was also president of both the National Space Society and the Science Fiction Writers of America."
Tor.com reports Bova has passed "due to complications from COVID-19 and a stroke..."
Born in 1932, Bova brought experience to the science fiction genre that few authors could match: he worked as a technical editor for the U.S.'s Project Vanguard, the first effort on the part of the country to launch a satellite into space in 1958. Bova went on to work as a science writer for Avco Everett Research Laboratory, which built the heat shields for the Apollo 11 module, putting man on the Moon and ensuring that science fiction would continue to increasingly define the future.
It was around that time that Bova began writing and publishing science fiction. He published his first novel, The Star Conquerors, in 1959, and followed up with dozens of others in the following years, as well as numerous short stories that appeared in publications such as Amazing Stories, Analog Science Fact and Fiction, Galaxy Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and others. In 1971, he took over the helm of Analog following the death of its long-running editor, John W. Campbell Jr. — a huge task, given Campbell's influence on the genre to that point... From there, he became the first editor of Omni Magazine until 1982, and consulted on television shows such as The Starlost and Land of the Lost.
While Bova wrote an episode of The Land of the Lost, his best-known works "involved plausible sciences about humanity's expansion into the universe, looking at how we might adapt to live in space..." notes Tor.
The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction argues that "the straightforwardness of Bova's agenda for humanity may mark him as a figure from an earlier era; but the arguments he laces into sometimes overloaded storylines are arguments it is important, perhaps absolutely vital, to make."
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