Like many skiffy nerds, I am powerless when confronted with the sequel(s) to a book I really enjoyed. Since I had really loved John Varley's Red Thunder -- for its easy, breezy narrative tone, its ripping-good-yarn plotline (four young adults, a drunken astronaut and a Cajun idiot savant go to Mars!), the 90%-of-everyone-gets-a-happy-ending finish -- I was, of course, a total sucker for the sequel, Red Lightning.
I am pleased to report this sequel is a strong follow-up effort. Red Thunder worked because it was set about ten minutes in the future, so the mix of the familiar and the new was enticing, not alienating. Red Lightning is set some twenty years after that, and while I suspect some of the extrapolation may feel dated by 2026 (i.e. "googling" as a common verb), the portrait of an America that just doesn't know when to stop fighting terror is wincingly current-feeling, and the depiction of the terrorist-obsessed government that can't come through when its citizens are the victims of a natural disaster opened up a fresh wellspring of outrage. Again, a mix of the familiar and the new -- but a different mix, so a different reader experience.
The book's not really a meditation on what's going on now. Like all good science fiction books, it provides an alternative model and asks, "What if ...?" And the government Varley proposes by the end seems pretty outrageous now, but I'm betting it'll seem less so in another year or two.
So if you like a little light space opera mixed with piercing social commentary and a charmingly self-deprecating coming-of-age story, read Red Lightning. Heck, read both Red Thunder and Red Lightning. They're perfect summer reading.
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