Customer Reviews

Red Thunder

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

In this stirring tribute to Heinlein, the space program, US ingenuity, the power of family, and everything in between, John Varley has won back a reader.

I read and enjoyed the 'Titan' series years and years ago, but... what happened since then - autopilot? But here he is again, the master in top form. Red Thunder is everything a novel should be - funny, moving, tense, and ultimately, fufilling.

The science is not 'hard science', but that merely improves an already outstanding story, in my opinion. Long-winded and scientifically rigorous science would have only slowed down this fast-paced story. Brilliant characterization - it's been a good long while since a cast of characters has come alive so well for me.

The ending is stirring and cynical all at the same time, and I closed the book with a satisfied grin on my face - the best compliment I can pay to any author, I think.

Here's hoping Varley decides to write a sequel - long live the crew of the Red Thunder!

Think, as the characters themselves say, "The Little Rascals Go to Mars," and you'll be close to the flavor of this engaging book. There's also a fair amount of Heinlein juvenile (especially _Rocket Ship Galileo_), which is understandable since Varley is a deep fan of Heinlein. The setting is Daytona, Florida, where Manny Garcia, twenty-year-old heir to a crumbling motel, and his best friend, Dak, and his girl, Kelly, and Dak's girl, Alicia, nearly run over a drunken ex-astronaut on the beach one night. (Lots of Heinleinian names, there, too.) The astronaut is Travis Broussard, one of a large clan of Cajuns from the Florida panhandle, and cousin of Jubal, a mildly autistic Einstein-class genius, who has invented (he's not quite sure how) a "squeezer" -- a device whose nature is never really explained, but which is the potential source of nearly unlimited energy. But Manny and Dak are both space nuts and to them and the girls, the Squeezer means a way of getting to Mars, where American and Chinese spaceships are now headed. With the power source taken care of it, would it really be possible to build -- in the course of one summer and with a budget of only one million dollars -- a privately-owned vehicle capable of getting them to the Red Planet and back? Varley shows you how it might, maybe, possibly, be done. With NASA having done most of the research and testing over the years, and with computers so small and cheap, and with many of the necessary parts (like a food freezer from Sears) purchased off-the-shelf, and with vital specialized hardware like space suits available for a little dickering from Russia, and with Travis's extensive experience as a space pilot, . . . well, why not? I'm sure there are plenty of implausibilities, but who cares? It's all great fun, in any case.

Absolute unmitigated crap. A near-total waste of time. Complete drivel. John Varley owes me $7.99, plus tax.

Pardon the rant but I am SO disappointed in this book. For years I've considered Varley my favorite sci-fi author. Hell, I consider him one of my favorite authors of ANY genre. "Millenium" is my favorite time travel novel. The "Gaia" trilogy rocks. His "Eight Worlds" short stories are fantastic. I even liked "Steel Beach" and "The Golden Globe". I eagerly await his books and buy them the moment they're available (in paperback, that is.) Fact is, I'm a one-man John Varley fan club. So I was completely unprepared for the travesty that is "Red Thunder." I forced myself to read it to the end solely out of respect for Varley. If I wasn't violently opposed to book burning, I'd have put a match to it after the first 50 pages.

Other reviewers have mentioned that the book is a homage to some of Heinlein's teenage oriented books. Perhaps my lack of appreciation of "Red Thunder" stems from my never having read any Heinlein other than "Stranger In a Strange Land" but I don't think that's the reason. I don't like it simply because the plot is inane, the characters two-dimensional and the resolution simplistic. Other than the base technology that powers the ship (the Squeeze drive), there's none of the characteristic Varley inventiveness. The book is just basic sci-fi pulp that could have been squeezed out by any hack. Maybe I hold Varley to too high a standard but I expected MUCH more from the mind that created Louise Baltimore, Cirocco Jones and Sparky Valentine.

Please do yourself a favor and pass on "Red Thunder." If you're a Varley fan you'll hate it. If you're new to Varley, read his older better stuff.

Of course, your mileage may differ.

John Varley is well-known as a writer much influenced by Heinlein, and Red Thunder pretty openly advertises its influence. To begin with the basic plot echoes slightly that of Heinlein's first juvenile, Rocket Ship Galileo. In the Heinlein book, a couple of teenagers, with the help of a knowledgeable older man, build a spaceship and travel to the Moon. In Red Thunder, four teenagers, with the help of a knowledgeable older man (an ex-astronaut), built a spaceship and travel to Mars. Also, Varley adds in a couple of very direct RAH references by way of character names: the main character is named Manny Garcia, and another major character is named Jubal. Basically, the book is good fun, propelled (pun intended) by a thoroughly implausible scientific advance but otherwise at least in the range of plausibility, with a heartfelt and not too overt message about responsibility and power at its core.

One night Manny and his best friend Dak, and their girlfriends Kelly and Alicia, having just witnessed the latest Venture Star launch, run over a drunk man on a Florida beach. The Venture Star is a shuttle successor, and this latest launch would be boring and routine except that the passengers are the astronauts on NASA's Mars mission. (The book was obviously finished before February 1, 2003, and thus in mentioning the potential dangers of space travel Challenger is brought up a few times, but never Columbia -- one of the pitfalls of writing SF!) Manny and Dak are space nuts, and their girlfriends tolerate this. Manny and Dak are also trying to work their way through college on the Internet, handicapped by their relative poverty and the debased public school system. It turns out that the man they run over is Travis Broussard, an ex-astronaut who was quietly pushed out of NASA a few years previously. And Travis's ex-wife is one of the Mars astronauts.

They strike up a friendship with Travis (who is uninjured by the mishap, thanks to the sand he was laying in), and soon they meet his strange cousin Jubal. Jubal is mentally damaged by his father's abuse, but he is extremely intelligent in his odd way. And Manny stumbles across an invention of Jubal's, the potential of which Jubal doesn't recognize, but Travis does -- it offers the possibility of a spacedrive that can maintain 1g acceleration for approximately forever. One thing leads to another, and the kids hatch an idea for building a spaceship, powered by Jubal's drive, that can get to Mars fast enough to beat not only the American mission but the Chinese mission that is slightly ahead of the Americans. All becomes more urgent when Jubal figures out that the American spaceship has a flaw, which could lead to a disaster -- and only a spaceship like the one they propose to build could possibly rescue anyone. But there are problems, such as convincing the kids' parents to let them go ...

Well, as I said -- good fun. The characters are engaging and involving, though there is a bit of convenience in the way all the good guys are good in just the right ways. I'd say it was a perfectly appropriate YA book -- though there is a fair amount of sex. The central SFnal McGuffin, Jubal's drive, is totally unbelievable, but why quibble? The other SFnal element, the technical and logistical details of building the rest of the spaceship, are, I suspect, a bit stretched, but Varley tries hard to make that stuff work, and it mostly does.

"Titan," this ain't.

John Varley's done some novels, most notably "Millennium" and the Gaia trilogy, that are full of Big Ideas and sprawling imagination. In contrast, "Red Thunder" is a popcorn movie, all concerned with fun and momentum forward.

Literally a novel about four friends who help assemble a homemade spaceship in an attempt to be the first people on Mars -- with the help of a disgraced ex-astronaut and his idiot savant cousin -- "Red Thunder" is a love letter to the Robert Heinlein "juvenile" novels about people pulling themselves up by the bootstraps of their moon boots and heading out into space for adventure.

And "Red Thunder" succeeds at that, handily, in fact. His physics, once you get over the giant deus ex machina at the heart of the revolutionary space drive, are pretty good. His realpolitik is excellent, and a bit more canny than Heinlein. And, for once, Varley doesn't emulate Heinlein at the end of his life, meaning this is his first novel in decades without strong (and often somewhat strange) sexual content.

This is a fun-for-all-ages, no deep thinking necessary adventure novel. Judged on its own merits, it's a definite success. Judged as part of the Varley canon, it feels like something he just knocked out for fun between bigger projects. I'm definitely looking forward to seeing his next big project, whatever it might be.

Strongly recommended for space adventure fans of all ages, especially readers of earlier Robert Heinlein novels.

I really enjoyed this book. It is the first book by Mr. Varley that I have ever read. It makes me want to go and check out some of his previous stuff. This flat out for me was a good entertaining read. I could really relate with the characters, as they remind me of the group I ran with in high school. Being a SF fan, I can honestly say I have thought about what it might be like to build your own craft and fly off to another world, and I get to enjoy that feeling with this book. It had romance, comedy, and drama, and yes it may have been a bit predictable, but if you take it for what its worth, thats ok. I thought the plot was reasonable, the characters were entertaining, and if you are looking for a nice read just to escape, I would highly reccomend this one. I am reading it again right now, and enjoying it just as much as the first time I opened it.

I liked the Wizard Trilogy, the short stories, Ophiuchi Hotline and the others a lot and they stayed with me as examples of solid SF. Then I read Steel Beach and I thought "wow, this is some good stuff, that Varley has really hit his stride". Later I read Golden Globe and it was so great I actually read it right through again before I returned it to the library. So I was very excited to see Red Thunder.

One word: Yawn. We have every cardboard caricature character in there from the smart-but-poor-and-alienated teenager who has inexplicably landed the hot rich girlfriend to the has-been astronaut they befriend to the idiot-savant heart-of-gold jolly-old-elf. It's 411 pages long but I only got to about 145 and just gave up. I think they were about to build a rocket but I really couldn't bring myself to care (especially as some other reviewers claim that the stuff I've already read is the best part!). Very disappointing book from the author of the exciting and idea-rich Steel Beach and Golden Globe.

I can see how people are comparing it to the Heinlein juveniles and I can kind of see their point. Unfortunately this book is so bad that it actually makes me think the juveniles weren't as good as I thought. I thought there was an undefinable *something* that made the semi-wooden Heinlein juvenile characters work, but it might be just the fact that I read them at an earlier age or that I expect less from an older book.

Pure fun - one of the most enjoyable books I've read in a long time.

"Delightful" is not a word I often use, especially to describe sci-fi novels. But "Red Thunder" is a simply delightful read, a fun, fast-paced joy ride of a story. Don't get me wrong, I love high-tech violence and bleak, dystopian futures as much as the next guy, but it's nice to know science fiction can still bring a smile as well.

Which is not to say that "Red Thunder" is total fluff. It tells the story of four Florida teenagers who strike up an unlikely friendship with a disgraced astronaut and his semi-autistic genius brother. The group hatches a scheme to use one of the brother's inventions to build a home-made spaceship, and sets about trying to beat the Chinese to Mars.

If that sounds a bit unlikely, well, sure, it is. Varley puts a lot of effort into making the ship and its propulsion system sound plausible, and he succeeds well enough. The idea of four teenagers becoming a crack team of spacecraft engineers is more of a stretch. But so what? It's fun! You want to see these kids go to Mars, so when the ship develops miraculously fast, you cheer rather than question. Are they going to succeed? Of course. The end is no more in doubt than in a Disney movie. But you still want to go along for the ride.

This is my first encounter with John Varley, and the man is clearly a gifted storyteller. The story fairly bubbles as it moves along. The tone is light, and the characters likable. From what other reviewers have said, Varley has lost a step. If so, I am eager to read his earlier work.

When Varley burst on the scene in 1974 he instantly became my favorite sci-fi author. I still think "The Black Hole Passes" is one of the best short stories I've ever read. Well, maybe second to "The Last of the Winnebagos."

But as the decade turned, Varley began to lose me -- the Titan trilogy was twee, with way too much wizardry and not enough science. Millennium, Steel Beach and Blue Champagne had their moments, but were nowhere near his potential. And to tell the truth, I never even finished The Golden Globe.

So it was with considerably lowered expectations that I began Red Thunder, but I was soon flabbergasted to see the old John back in form after his devastating brush with acclaim. Oh, the novel may read a bit like a Heinlein juvenile, or my personal description "Huck Finn in Space," but these are hardly derogatory descriptions are they. He kept the pace exactly right, the characters imaginatively and believably drawn, the science plausibly glossed-over, and the arc of the story predictable without seeming overly automatic. One could quibble about certain scientific assumptions -- thrust in space, navigation by sight, lack of shielding at 3 million mph -- but these would be beside the point.

The point is, this story was classic Varley, with all the humor, good nature, wit and clever plotting that caused me to fall in love with him 30 years ago.

It's good to have you back, John.