As editor of the magazines Analog and Omni, he was a champion of a new generation of authors, including George R.R. Martin.
Ben Bova was a hard-science guy — and a passionate space program booster — and his visions of the future encompassed a dizzying array of technological advances (and resulting horrors or delights), including cloning, sex in space, climate change, the nuclear arms race, Martian colonies and the search for extraterrestrials. In newspaper articles, short stories and more than 100 books, he explored these and other knotty human problems.
Mr. Bova, who died on Nov. 29 in Naples, Fla., at 88, had a background in journalism and technical science writing, and his work was based in facts. He was determinedly not a fantasy author.
“Ben Bova is the last of the great pulp writers,” Gerald Jonas wrote in The New York Times in 2004, reviewing “Tales of the Grand Tour,” a collection of Bova short stories about exploring the solar system. “Not for Bova the ambiguities and excesses of cyberpunk rage, nanotech noodling or quantum weirdness,” he continued. “His characters resemble elements in the periodic table, clearly defined by a few well-chosen traits.”
"Reading Bova,” Mr. Jonas concluded, “you are always aware of solid ground beneath your feet — even when the protagonist is an alien life form swimming in Jupiter’s world-girdling, 5,000-kilometer-deep ocean.”
(Mr. Bova often pondered the possibilities of sex in zero gravity. In one article, he proposed, as he put it, “an advertising slogan that an orbital honeymoon hotel could use: If you like water beds, you’re going to love zero gee.”)
But it was his role as editor of Analog magazine that made him beloved in the science fiction world, now a sprawling community but a bit smaller in 1971, when he took over after the death of John W. Campbell, the magazine’s celebrated editor.
Analog was the latest incarnation of Astounding Science Fiction, the paperback-size pulp magazine that began in 1930 and ignited the careers of Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard (the founder of Scientology) and others from the so-called golden age of the genre, which lasted from the late 1930s to midcentury, according to Alec Nevala-Lee, author of the 2018 book “Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction.”
Mr. Bova broadened Analog’s male-hero-based, hard-science ethos by embracing darker and more nuanced work from authors like Joe Haldeman, Spider Robinson, Vonda N. McIntyre and George R.R. Martin.
“Without him, I cannot say for certain I would have had a career at all,” Mr. Martin wrote on his blog when Mr. Bova died. Many of Mr. Martin’s stories were published and edited by Mr. Bova. When Mr. Bova left Analog in 1978 to run Omni magazine, a glossy science fiction publication started by Kathy Keeton and Bob Guccione of Penthouse, Mr. Martin went with him.
The year before, Analog published an issue consisting entirely of work by female writers. But Mr. Bova was not always a champion of women in the gender wars, which at the time were particularly fraught in science fiction, long a male-dominated field. At a convention in 1980, as The New York Times reported in 1982, he said that women had not “raised the level of science fiction a notch.”
“Women have written a lot of books about dragons and unicorns,” he added, “but damned few about future worlds in which adult problems are addressed.”
Some colleagues say that the remark was out of character, and note that Mr. Bova had promoted the careers of a number of young female science fiction editors.
“He was seriously interested in the future,” said Robert Silverberg, a science fiction writer who contributed to Analog. “Science fiction wasn’t just a literary venture for him.”
Benjamin William Bova was born on Nov. 8, 1932, in Philadelphia, the oldest of three children. His father, Benjamin Pasquale Bova, worked in a tailor’s shop; his mother, Giove (Caporiccio) Bova, was a homemaker.
Mr. Bova graduated a year early from South Philadelphia High School and earned a degree in journalism from Temple University, a master’s in communication from the State University of New York at Albany and a Ph.D. in education from California Coast University, an online program.
Early in his career, Mr. Bova was a newspaper reporter and editor and then a technical writer and editor for Martin Aircraft, where he worked on Project Vanguard, the first American artificial satellite. He was later a marketing manager at Avco-Everett Research Laboratory in Everett, Mass., where “hot air specialists,” as he described his colleagues, did research on lasers and high temperature gases for the Air Force and built heat shields for the Apollo modules.
Mr. Bova was a science adviser to film and television productions, including “Sleeper,” Woody Allen’s futuristic 1973 comedy. (He was uncredited.)
In 1970, Mr. Bova and his fellow science fiction author Harlan Ellison wrote a short story about a robot police office set in the not-too-distant future. “Brillo,” as they titled it, was also part of a pitch they made to Paramount Pictures for a series based on their tale. When a show called “Future Cop” appeared on ABC, Mr. Ellison sued, winning a judgment of $337,000. He used some of the proceeds to put up a billboard across from Paramount’s offices in Hollywood that read, in part, “Don’t Let Them Steal From You.”
For his work as an editor, Mr. Bova was awarded the Hugo Award six times by the World Science Fiction Society. He taught science fiction at Harvard University and the Hayden Planetarium in Manhattan. In 2005, he received a lifetime achievement award from the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation “for fueling mankind’s imagination regarding the wonders of outer space.” He was president emeritus of the National Space Society and the Science Fiction Writers of America.
His marriage to Rosa Cucinotta ended in divorce. He met his second wife, Barbara Berson, a literary agent, at a science fiction convention. They clicked, their son Ken Bova recalled in an interview, when she told Mr. Bova, “I grok you” — an expansive neologism familiar to both Robert Heinlein fans and counterculture boomers. She died in 2009.
His third wife, Rashida Loya-Bova, confirmed his death, in a Naples hospital, saying the cause was complications of a stroke.
In addition to her and his son Ken, Mr. Bova is survived by two other sons, Michael Bova and Seth Warren Rose; two daughters, Gina Bova and Elizabeth Bova Osborne; his sister, Barbara Brusco; and several grandchildren.
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