Millennium, by Ben Bova

Originally published January 2015

It's already been a few days since we said goodbye to 2014 and hello to 2015. The year feels like it's moving a bit more slowly than last year did.

This year also marks the 15th anniversary of the change from 1999 to 2000. Why don't we celebrate this with Millennium, the 1976 science-fiction/political thriller by acclaimed SF author Ben Bova?

I had never heard of him before I bought the book at my local public library's annual book sale. I looked into his bibliography a while ago, and he is one of the more prolific fiction and non-fiction authors out there. Seriously, he has a lot of books, novellas, short stories, and articles to his name.

My review of this novel is the first of what I hope will be a recurring subsection of the Museum: "Side Trips." I had meant the earlier Stephen King's Storm of the Century to be the first one, but it fell more into the holiday/Halloween theme.

Side Trips are about the turn of the millennium, but look at it from another angle. For example, Storm was not set in the lead-up to 2000, but used a lot of the anxieties of the time to flavor the story. Likewise, Millennium's flavoring comes from a very '70s conception of the future: Life on Earth is pure shit, because the water, air, and land are irretrievably polluted; poverty has become more-or-less widespread; and there's another war over rapidly dwindling resources looming on the horizon.

Life on the Moon (or "Selene," as it's referred to), on the other hand, is pretty damn good. Our hero, Air Force colonel Chet Kinsman, is the head of the American moon-base. Surprisingly (and controversially to many of his peers), he's on very good terms with his Russian counterpart, Col. Leonov, the head of Lunagrad, the Russian moon-base. Of course, one would have to be good at sharing things and keeping good relations, because resources--water, air, food rations, parts, minerals, power--are finite.

More than that, though, Chet is tired of fighting and killing, damn tired. When he learns that America is about to engage in what could lead to World War III, he hatches a scheme that sends the leaders of both factions panic: Unite the two moon-bases into one independent nation and take over the orbiting control stations for the USA's and the USSR's ballistic missiles. (In other words, Bova just foreshadowed the Strategic Defense Initiative, or "Star Wars," from the 80s.)

Will our heroes succeed? Or will the powers that be find him and stop him? You'll have to find out for yourself!
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I found Millennium a nice little piece of retro-futurism when I read it a few months ago. Uniquely, it's not really a "science-fiction thriller;" it's a thriller with science-fiction elements. It sounds like I'm splitting hairs, but in this case the author gets the sci-fi stuff established in the first couple of chapters, lets more and more of the "thriller" aspect bleed through, and just keeps ratcheting up the tension and building up the stakes with every chapter.

My advice to anyone who wants to read it is, don't read it all at once. Take one chapter every day, just like the old Saturday-morning cliffhangers (Flash Gordon and other productions spring to mind).

Aside from all that, "how does it fit into the overall picture of the Millennium?" In some ways, quite well. What dates the book is how it assumes that the Soviet Union will still exist in 1999, and in my own opinion, the fall of the USSR had a major effect on the American psyche, especially with the century's end just around the corner. On the one hand, it led to a lot of the call for international connection and cooperation (something that forms most of the book's moral), but on the other hand our nation became a little bit splintered, a little bit less cohesive, as seen in more recent books and productions such as the TV series Millennium (no relation).

On the whole, the author is more accurate on the themes than on the details. Pollution, the environment, and overpopulation are still big issues in 2015, and America is still very much at war, not only with other nations, but also with itself. There's still a sense that the clock is ticking.

Would that we could all follow Chet Kinsman's example, and just focus on getting something done.