BOOKS: Rolling Thunder, John Varley (2008)

Third in the Garcia family series.

Red Thunder gave us the adventures of Manny Garcia, one of the first men to land on Mars; Red Lightning was the story of his son, Ray Strickland-Garcia, a Martian (that's a human resident of Mars, not an alien indigenous to Mars) hotelier who gets caught up in the political intrigue after a (not entirely) natural disaster strikes Earth.

For this volume, we leap forward one more generation; our heroine is Podkayne Strickland-Garcia-Redmond. (Any more volumes/generations, and the last name will be too long to fit on a single page.) Yes, Podkayne, like in the Heinlein novel; that first generation of Martians got caught up in the whole "we are Martians!" thing. You know how it is.

And Poddy takes after the typical Heinlein heroine in more than just name.She's tall, smart, strikingly beautiful, and talented in multiple fields, though her specialty is music. It's as a singer, in fact, that she joins the Martian Navy, touring with her band to give morale-boosting concerts at remote outposts.

Now when you travel to remote military outposts on planets and moons that are still essentially untamed and incapable of supporting human life, some nasty shit can happen. Like, for instance, the mountainous life-forms of Europa suddenly erupting from the surface of the moon and flying through space to Earth.

What are they up to? Can we communicate with them? Will humanity survive? It's a good old-fashioned setup, Poddy's a likable character, and Varley's always an entertaining writer. But Poddy is oddly removed from the action; while those mountains are flying to (and landing on) Earth, Poddy is off stage, and doesn't return until the action is largely played out. And when faced with a crisis at the end of the book, which you'd expect to lead to the most creative and dazzling solution, Varley instead allows his characters to duck the issue, essentially just running away from it.

Rolling Thunder is fun from moment to moment, and I think those who enjoyed the first two volumes in the series (both of which I do recommend) will like this one, too. But if there's a fourth volume, and there's certainly plenty of room left for one, I hope that the plotting will return to the tautness of those earlier volumes.