Rolling Thunder

I love this series. I was hooked with the first book and havent been able to put any of them down.

This is book 3 of 4 in the series and introduces Jubals bride. While this is important, other events are left hanging. Podkaynes connection to Earths invaders is left unanswered here and in book 4. Perhaps book 5 is coming?

I read this one first not knowing it was the 3rd in the series. Loved the book cant wait to read the first two books and cant wait for the fourth book to come out.

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.

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.

I have now finished reading the story of the Garcia-Strickland family. And it was pretty good. Not great, however. I liked the twist abouth how this generation of Garcias ended up in a space career, but I sometimes wonder at the likelihood of such a person being able to accomplish so much in such a major crisis. IOW, this book stamped finished to the storyline, but left me somewhat unsatisfied. Red Thunder was the kind of book which grabbed the reader by the throat and refused to let go until the reader reached the last page. Red Lightning, while less aggressive, carried on the storyline and clearly was a logical extension of what happened in RT. Rolling Thunder, however... Dont get me wrong. John Varley is an excellent writer. And his ability to create believable characters and realistic dialog are well-honed. By and large, his plot carried itself well. Its just that things were proceeding along right up until... And its that until which, in my opinion, doomed Rolling Thunder to decent and adequate status rather than superb and excellent conclusion. He chose at one point to have a character - if you can call an alien life form which no one can communicate with character - do something which totally changes the tone of the book from space adventure to end-of-humanity suspense. It would be fine if there were a Bruce Willis character, who, with his team of plucky oil-rig workers, came out and put paid to the threat, but Varley let the E-O-H crisis continue unabated. Im not saying that all crises in real life end on a happy note, but given the general upbeat, we can solve this if we put our minds to it, approach of books one and two, the were gonna slink off with our tails between our legs finish simply didnt end the series right.

Rolling Thunder (2008) is the third SF novel in the Thunder and Lightning series, following

Read this at the Pismp Beach a long time ago but never seen to the other two books at the book store. Great story and characters; a must read for SCI-FI fans.

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

Quite fun. An old favorite.