The Young Ben Bova, Before the Hugos

Most readers know Ben Bova (1932–2020) as an institution: six-time Hugo winner, the editor who took over Analog from John W. Campbell in 1971 and later ran Omni, the author of the sprawling Grand Tour novels. But every institution starts as a young writer with a typewriter and a story to sell, and a handful of Bova's earliest tales, written in the early 1960s before any of the fame, survive in the public domain.

They're a fascinating window into a major talent still finding its range. The hard-SF rigour that would define his later career is already visible; so is the storyteller's instinct for a clean idea and a clean payoff.

The early stories

Among the Bova stories in our library are The Dueling Machine (1963), a sharp piece about a technology for settling disputes without bloodshed, and what happens when someone games it; Answer, Please Answer (1962), a quiet, eerie first-contact story; and The Next Logical Step (1962), a war-game story with a cold, clever twist. There's also the early novella A Long Way Back (1960) and The Towers of Titan (1962).

Why they're worth your time

Read them not as juvenilia but as the foundations. This is a writer who would go on to shape science fiction for half a century, caught at the moment he was teaching himself how. And because they predate his fame, they're free to read here, the young Ben Bova, before the Hugos, in his own words.