[3NC]⇒ PDF Free Red Lightning A Thunder and Lightning Novel John Varley 9780441014880 Books

Red Lightning A Thunder and Lightning Novel John Varley 9780441014880 Books

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Red Lightning A Thunder and Lightning Novel John Varley 9780441014880 Books

I love this series. Varley comes up with very creative and very original concepts. The characters he creates are terrific detailed and interesting. I particularly like how each book is narrated by the next generation in the family. So you get to see how life turned out for the characters you read about in the LAST book and get a glimpse into the future with the new characters.

I also like how the books are set in OUR time or just a few years from our time. Because of this you can really think "how would the world be if something like this occurs?" rather than imagining an entire new world set in the far future. I do like books set in the future but Varley's setting this in current times adds a terrific extra dimension.

Definitely worth picking up and reading!


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Red Lightning A Thunder and Lightning Novel John Varley 9780441014880 Books Reviews

With a career that spans over thirty years, John Varley is only moderately prolific, with just over a dozen novels to his name. Fortunately, he is an author who is well worth the wait between books. Red Lightning once again shows why he continues to be one of the greats in science fiction.

Red Lightning is the sequel to Red Thunder. The earlier novel dealt with a group of young adults who build their own spaceship despite government intervention (similar to The Astronaut Farmer (which came later), but also plotted rather differently). Red Lightning takes place a couple decades later and is narrated by Ray Garcia-Strickland, son of one of the Red Thunder heroes. In the intervening years between the two books, humanity has successfully colonized Mars and established based throughout the solar system. Earth, however, remains the center of the human universe.

A mysterious object hits the Atlantic at near-light velocity, creating a massive tsunami that devastates the Caribbean and the east coast of the U.S., leading to economic and political crises. The first part of the book deals with Ray and his family going from Mars to Earth to explore the damage and rescue some relatives; the second portion, taking place on Mars, has Earth invading the colony and inadvertently sparking calls for independence.

When reading this book, you'd think that the Katrina disaster would have been an influence, but a look at the copyright shows it was published too soon after that hurricane to really have an impact on the novel (though Varley does refer to it in an afterword); it was the Indonesian tsunami of 2004 that had more influence. Literarily, there is an obvious Heinlein effect, especially Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

Though dealing with heavy issues, Varley writes with a light touch (though not so light as to trivialize what's going on). This helps make Red Lightning another fun Varley novel. If you want to read good (or great) old-fashioned style science fiction, Varley delivers the goods with Red Lightning.
My second Varley book and I liked it. reasonable character build up with some real good side stories'
Jubal is great. I'm a big fan of Heinlein and Varley use some of the same character names in what I assume is a tribute
The sequel to one of my favorite SF books ever. I love that it handles the changes to the world created by the squeezer and isn't just the same story over again. (Though one couldn't expect that from Varley - look at Titan, Wizard, and Demon.) It's a cool move to go forward a generation in each sequel with the characters we know having gotten older and the focus being shifted to the kids.
Varley's sequel to "Red Thunder" -- which was a fun adventure story in the mold of Robert Heinlein's series for young readers -- is a continuation of the story but told in a more adult manner. Like Heinlein's "Starship Troopers" or the Methuselah series, "Red Lightning" depicts a series of disasters and militant takeovers which, while well-written and probably more accurate to human nature, nevertheless exhibit some of the nastier sides of humanity. As such, I found this book somewhat tough slogging, in exactly the same way that Heinlein's pessimism is eventually too depressing to enjoy.

Written as it was between two real disasters -- 9/11 and the Indonesian tsunami -- perhaps Varley's mind was too occupied by disasters to be light, optimistic and cheery.

I thought the first few chapters were marvelous writing, and the quality of the writing didn't really dip as the story went on. Just the subject matter got sad, then barbaric, then inhuman, and finally appalling. That's something I associate more with Heinlein than Varley.
Well-paced, believable characters and dialog, and a compelling -- albeit occasionally improbable -- story, reminiscent of Robert Heinlein's early "juvenile" (now called young adult) science fiction, yet updated to the modern day and featuring a more culturally diverse cast of characters.*

In fact, the three books in Varley's series contain many obvious nods to Heinlein, so it's clear he was influenced by those stories too.

I liked Red Thunder and Red Lightning a lot. I'll be buying more John Varley books.

[* Heinlein's books were very culturally diverse, actually, but his stories for teens less obviously so, and for some readers his books suffer from having been written in the context of the 1950s, '60s, etc.]
Count me in agreement with reviewers who feel the tsunami storyline drags. The characters can only search wreckage for people they knew; and this is not even on the scale of the cyclones that strike lowlands of the Indian sub-continent. So they return to Mars, depressed. The cause of the disaster is suspect, and theoretically possible.
The rest of the book could stand alone as a novelette; I wonder what happened to Varley's plot outline?
I love this series. Varley comes up with very creative and very original concepts. The characters he creates are terrific detailed and interesting. I particularly like how each book is narrated by the next generation in the family. So you get to see how life turned out for the characters you read about in the LAST book and get a glimpse into the future with the new characters.

I also like how the books are set in OUR time or just a few years from our time. Because of this you can really think "how would the world be if something like this occurs?" rather than imagining an entire new world set in the far future. I do like books set in the future but Varley's setting this in current times adds a terrific extra dimension.

Definitely worth picking up and reading!