A Bit More Detail

I used to be a big fan of Ben Bova until I read his 1993 novel The Trikon Deception, co-authored with Bill Pogue. The plot's interesting enough, with a private corporation operating a high-security lab in Earth orbit tasked with preventing Earth's ecological collapse, but one lthrowaway line in a character's bio tripped me. She was born in Quebec City; she had experienced, Bova and Pogue went on to say, in a community that had experienced language strike.

Quebec City is 95% Francophone. If there's any Québec metropolis not torn by ethnic strife, Quebec City is it.

The failure of his fact-checking in this instance made me wonder just how much of his material was similarly wrong, in areas that I was unfamiliar with. Later, I came up with more reasons for distancing myself from Bova, like his wooden prose style and his identikit plots.