Rolling Thunder by John Varley

I'm about the last person to complain about the science in a SF novel -- in fact, I've been known to make fun of such people -- but one element of Rolling Thunder actually sent me to my own (metaphoric) flying slip-stick. One of the gloomy background elements of this novel is that a series of interstellar colonization starships went out, roughly a generation ago (Varley doesn't give an exact date), and none of them have come back yet. Without knowing the precise details, I can't complain too much, but given the acceleration specified for a similar vehicle near the end of the book, and the handy Relativistic Star Ship Calculator, it would take a little over thirty-six years to go to Alpha Centauri and immediately return. Other stars are, of course, further away, and so a round trip to any of them would take longer. Leaving aside the assumption that a colonization ship would return quickly (or at all), it's not at all clear that there's been enough time for any of these ships to have made it back to our solar system in the first place.

I may be maligning Varley; it's possible that he means his main character to be dumber than she seems. But I don't think so.

Rolling Thunder is a minor Varley book, the most recent, and possibly even the most minor, of the minor books he's been writing this decade. It may be selfish and petty of me, but I prefer a decade with two great Varley novels, like Steel Beach and The Golden Globe, to one with four tepid ones. This decade has been good for people who like to read books with the words "John Varley" printed on them at regular intervals, but not nearly so good for Varley fans.

Varley used to be a highly individual writer, who wrote books only he could have. But the current stretch of books -- Red Thunder and Red Lightning, in this series, and the time-travel snugglebunny Mammoth -- have seen him attempt to turn himself into a slavish Heinlein imitator, which is to no one's benefit.

Rolling Thunder is the first-person story of Patricia Kelly Elizabeth Podkayne Strickland-Garcia-Redmond, who is terribly, terribly spunky but still can't quite live up to that septuple-barrelled name. She is, as you've probably guessed, a young Marswoman with a younger brother (though he doesn't come into the story much). Her voice is clear and distinct and deeply enjoyable, and its virtues nearly hide the fact that nothing of any consequence happens in this novel for the first hundred and fifty pages.

Poddy -- of course she goes by Podkayne; did you have any doubt? -- starts Rolling Thunder as the sole employee of a minor Martian consulate in southern California, in the middle of her Israeli-esque mandatory government service. But she's soon catapulted back to Mars and then off to the outer system -- via a series of developments that reminded me of Charles Stross's similarly flawed but generally better Saturn's Children -- for her version of the Grand Tour.

Varley used to be able to write great female protagonists -- think of Anna-Louise Bach, or Fox from "The Phantom of Kansas" -- but he's been infected by late-Heinlein-ism here, and has fallen in love with his heroine, who can do no wrong nor be less than loved by anyone. Poddy is smart, cute, dependable, thriftybravecleanreverent...and an excellent musician and singer of old-fashioned lounge music (of the kind that I'm afraid Varley loves himself). She's sent on a USO-ish tour of the outer system, where she is greeted by massive success, adoring fans, and enigmatic alien doohickeys.

That last item finally kick-starts the plot out of "Poddy sees the solar system" mode, and the shit hits the fan spectacularly. (Red Lightning similarly had a long, leisurely opening before the big event that focused the rest of the book.) Once the fan has been metaphorically cleared, Poddy is vastly more beloved and special even than she was before, although the metaphoric fecal matter has done some unpleasant things to large chunks of humanity.

The story settles back down again after that -- there's only really that one big flurry of events for those looking for adventure or a conventional SF plot -- to Poddy's new life, which proceeds along lines that are unlikely and only barely made plausible by all of Varley's skill. Since many of you won't have read the end of Rolling Thunder, I won't explain further, but her personal life gets a big upheaval, and it smacks of (to be kind, and at the very least) Varley snipping off all of the loose ends in this world and tying it up in a bow.

The very last chapter has a cascade of Heinlein titles, shoved into sentences with a crowbar so that even the dimmest reader will realize that this book had something to do with Heinlein. That chapter also reads like Varley, through Poddy, is tap-dancing as fast as he can to sell his end status quo and make us believe it. Out of deference to my great respect for Varley's work, and for Poddy's undeniable vim and perkiness, I'll say that I found it believable.

Rolling Thunder is the third and least novel in Varley's least ambitious series, and seems to exist primarily to showcase how much Varley liked Heinlein. I liked Heinlein, too, but, to be perfectly blunt, I liked top-rank Varley better. And I sincerely hope that he's gotten the Heinlein homages out of his system, and can go back to Irontown Blues -- or on to something new and exciting and worthy of his immense talent.