'Powersat' by Ben Bova
'Powersat' by Ben Bova

The good

  • Fun premise: the quest to build satellites that use solar panels to gather energy and beam it down to earth. A reusable space plane that makes it affordable to travel to the satellites at low cost. It feels futuristic, but only slightly so given what SpaceX is doing nowadays.

  • Decent action, political intrigue, plotting, and pacing.

The not so good

  • The characters are all 2-dimensional tropes: the cocky US businessman; the racist Texan oil tycoon; the Arab villain who is a terrorist; the Irish guy who is a member of the IRA; the Hispanic guy who is a hired thug; everyone woman is stunningly attractive; and so on.

  • The love story is really cheesy.

  • The ending was a pretty bad letdown. It ends up wasting or contradicting many of the plot points in the book and is very unsatisfying. So the bad guy does successfully manage to use the satellite to kill over 1,000 people and comes within a hair of killing the US president, but everyone is OK with that, and the business continues? April manages to knife the villain and assert her independence, only for both of them to be blown up by a bomb dropped by the US air force? They manage to put a satellite in freaking outer space but have no sensors or cameras to tell them that someone is on board, has detached the antenna, has “concentrated” the energy beam to a dangerous level, etc?

Rating: 3 stars