Rolling Thunder

John Varley has written another endearing book. This is a worthy addition to the two previous books in the series. This time the book centers around Podkane, who is the next generation of the the heroes in the first two books. Pokane is nineteen and is serving her mandatory term in the Martian Armed Forces. After putting in about 6 months on Earth, the Mars-born Podkane is assigned to Europa. She is assigned to the Entertainment section of the Martian Armed Services. She forms a band and and tours the bases in Jovian system. All the main characters from the first two books are back and are living on a thriving Mars. The book is written in the first person and the writing is superb. The ending of the book is unexpected and paves the way for future sequels. Podkane is of course named by her parents after a heroine of a Heinlein juvenile. In the last chapter of the book Varley cleverly sneaks in the names of many Heinlein juvenile books.

The Good: The writing style is terrific. It feels human, it adds to characters, and is brilliant in its direction of the point of view. The Bad: Lazy story craft and characterization. Its a major turn off in a science fiction series to be presented with characters in the future that continually refer to present day themes and seem to identify with an age far before when the story takes place. Its a character driven novel, and Varley handles characters very well; I just found the continual references to anything and everything 20th century to be distracting to the point of pulling me out of the story. Takes a bit too much pleasure in its references to 20th century popular culture and other works of that time period to be a serious piece of science fiction, and suffers mightily for it.

This third book in the series continues the saga of an intertwined martian family. The story moves quickly between Earth, Mars, and the moons of Jupiter. John Varley spins a tale that makes this book hard to set down. One can only hope that the story will continue rolling on.

Im addicted to Varley. His characters talk and act they way I would. Its refreshing. I hope we dont have to wait too long for the next one.

Loved the book and the series. Wish there were more books in the series.

I wondered at first if this were going to be one of those rambling novels in which the author comes up with excuses for a character from the future to be intimately familiar with popular art and music that dear to someone born ca. 1950. The plot takes an awfully long to get moving, but it does get there. This is a fond tribute to many of the lesser-known Heinlein novels, especially the juvenilia, my favorites. Not Varleys best -- try Millennium, or even better, his faultless short story, Press Enter, if you can find it -- but still a considerable cut above any other science fiction youre likely to stumble on.

Book 3 of the series was the weakest. Red Thunder was good, and Red Lightening the 2nd in the series was the best, in my opinion.

Rolling Thunder the new novel by John Varley, tells the story of Podkayne, a Martian Naval Officer and singer extraordinaire. Varley, three time winner of the Hugo award and two time winner of the Nebula award, continues to tell stories full of strong female characters, and twisting, curving plots. Podkayne is the daughter and granddaughter of some of his characters from previous novels, and her story continues the tale of the exploration of our solar system in the not too distant future. Podkayne is just trying to get through her required service in the Martian Navy. What she really wants to be is a singer. When an opportunity to perform her music for the Navy on Europa ((one of Jupiters moons) is offered, she snatches up the chance. Her story seems simple, prosaic even (at least, as much as it can be for a good-looking nineteen year old), until she encounters Europas freckles. After that, her life takes a drastic turn, culminating the revelation of just what the Rolling Thunder really is, and what it means for her family. Varley has Podkayne tell the story memoir style, reliving her past by writing events from her perspective. So its a historical account of fictional events from one persons perspective. Its a unique way to tell a fiction story. Varleys story mirrors much of Heinleins works in style and content. Like Heinlein, he uses free societies and free love (with some rather explicit sex) in his stories, so this work is solely for adult reading. Rolling Thunder is a fast reading novel that packs a great deal into a few pages. Varley can get as much into his three hundred pages as other authors do in five hundred. It is a novel that takes many unexpected twists and turns, and its ending is both surprising and an excellent set up for more John Varley novels to come. I recommend this novel to adults who enjoy Heinlein, near space SF, or character driven plots.

I hadnt gotten more than a couple chapters into this novel published in 2008 when I realized that the 17th of November, 2009, must have hit John Varley like a boot in the gonads. He was REALLY suckered by the man-made global warming fraud. From start to finish, ROLLING THUNDER is a glimpse into the way an ex-hippie and failed college physics major who has schemed deliberately to assume the mantle of Robert Heinlein and build himself a reputation as a hard SF writer can fail to understand how scientific method works, and thus gets gulled, cullied, and thoroughly diddled by the climatology caliphate peddling the preposterous bullpuckey that increases in Earths atmospheric carbon dioxide content caused by human beings burning stuff could cause enough tropospheric heat trapping (by way of the greenhouse effect) to jack up the global temperature in any significant way. Im inclined to give the fundamentally stupid author a pass if he can give me a good story and decent characters, but Varley NEVER gives this garbage a rest, even finishing up the last chapter with the classic brain-dead IPCC-bamboozled idiot Repent! Repent! message about deadly-awful-horrible-nasty global warming. ROLLING THUNDER is readable as fiction, with a fair goshwowboyoboy factor (as Varley has shown from early days he knows how to do), but in succumbing to the mundane stupidity of the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming hoax, he demonstrates that even a talented journeyman speculative fiction writer can get himself led down a blind alley and whacked upside the head. Ive gotta wonder what John Varleys reaction was when he downloaded that FOIA2009.zip archive from the Net for himself and confronted confirmation that those of us on skeptical side have been calling this ginormous fraud correctly for the past thirty years. Anybody know how hes been responding at any SF conventions hes attended since the next-to-last month of 2009? I havent been able to Google up anything about him on this subject online.

had other books from this series