Varley ROLLING THUNDER

I just finished reading ROLLING THUNDER by John Varley. Film at eleven.

08/25/08 Update:
This, the third installment of the series that began with RED THUNDER, is a continuation of the ODTAA method of plot construction that also drove book two, BLUE THUNDER. Not my cup of tea. I very much liked RED THUNDER, and you can read my glowing review if you drill down into this blog (or at Amazon.com), but I found that BLUE and ROLLING left me wanting the great characters of RED. Sadly the protagonist Manny, of RED, is pretty much out of the picture and we have to make do with his kids and grand-children in the later books. The books are still very readable as Varley maintains his knack for smooth flow and logical sentance construction. It seems to me that Varley has latched onto this "Mantle of Heinlein" thing in a big way and, subsequently, abandoned the "Varleyesque" components of his 8-WORLDS and GAEA stories. His latest efforts demonstrate a fixation upon the teenage fantasy of the Heinlein juveniles that never captured my imagination even when I was a teenager. I know from reading MAMMOTH that the Varley of old still lives on, and that he is fully capable of writing the type of SF that put him at the top of the field. I think he has grown tired of SF and wants to break-out into something else. Read his blog and you will find scarce SF on his personal reading list. Maybe next year when W is out of office he will spend a little less effort trying to make a political difference and be able to focus on writing that great-American SF novel again. Whatever he comes out with I'll read eagerly because few writers have the potential to thrill like Varley. ROLLING THUNDER however is little more than a page-turner.

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