Ben Bova predicted Sputnik in 1949, but no publisher would touch his novel
Often , when scientific discipline fiction novel get rejected , there ’s some political shenanigans at work . Take typesetter’s case of Ben Bova , whose first novel aright predicted that the Soviet Union would beat the United States into space — and publishers would n’t plow it . Writing in his veritable chromatography column for the Naples Daily News , Bova recounts how he decide , in 1949 , to write a novel about the first person on the Moon ....