Rolling Thunder

Great stuff here! Youll love it if you love old masters. Wonderful homage to Heinlein but with its own plot!

I had a great time zipping through this book - nice to meet the next generation of characters in the series and catch up on the older ones. And it was fantastic to know that the great music lives on - Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald. Thanks John Varley! Fran Morris Rosman Executive Director The Ella Fitzgerald Charitable Foundation [...]

Lots of old school action , interesting characters , and a wonderful job of world building . Harkens back to the old days of R. A Heinlein .

Mars is an independent republic with colonies of its own having won the war with Earth and keeping the bubble technology for itself. The wave killed millions of people all over the land and made much of the land unusable for growing crops. It is considered hardship duty for anyone from the Martian military to be assigned earthside but Ensign Podkayne Strickland is a one woman show at the California when she is summoned home to say good bye to her ailing grandmother who is going into stasis until they find a cure for her. Now Podkayne is a lieutenant assigned to the music, arts, and drama division based on Europa where the Crystal Mountains are a popular tourist sight. They send out very powerful radio waves but nobody knows what they mean or if there is life forms in the mountains. Podkayne is visiting the tourist attraction and she sees the crystal mountain named grumpy lift off. She goes into stasis and when she wakes up ten years have passed. Grumpy and six other mountaineers have landed on earth totally decimating the planet. Mars cant take all the people who want to immigrate to earth, and fearful that the mountains will one day turn to Mars, Podkayne and her uncle Travis subsidize a way to avoid that possibility. ROLLING THUNDER takes place sometime in the twenty-first century when humans have colonized the solar system. Podkayne is an interesting multi-faceted character, a singer who is in the military yet thinks like a Martian as she was born and raised there. The allure of Mars and their relationship to a slowly deteriorating earth is examined in much detail. The socio-political events are witnessed through Podkaynes eyes and readers will empathize with the plight of earth yet like the Martians realize the people of the Red Planet cant save everyone. Harriet Klausner

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.

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

This was, by far, the most disappointing book in the series, and one of the worst endings to a series I have had bad fortune to read. Varley can be an amazing author, but this time he fails miserably.

Varley continues to channel Heinlein, and may well be the best alive in this genre of space adventure. Highly reccomended.

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.