Red Thunder by John Varley
Why not start with the best? If you enjoy the type of science fiction best practiced by the late Robert Heinlein (with only a portion of the political overtones) you will adore Red Thunder. Basic thesis: the United States has lost the race to Mars to the Chinese. A group of teenagers almost runs over a drunk one night while 4 wheeling about. Turns out the drunk is an ex-NASA pilot living in really rural Florida with his savant of a Cajun cousin, who just happens to invent the most powerful energy source ever known to man. Kids help the Captain sober up. Captain helps the kids grow up. Two teenage couples, the Captain, the cousin and a host of other oddballs, misfits, and miscreants get the idea to beat the Chinese to the Red Planet. They do, and in the process they, and the world, are changed forever.
This is pretty good science, pretty good pop psychology, pretty good characters, and just a whale of a good time. Love, challenge, family, and the good ole US of A where being determined and smart means you can accomplish anything. Yes, it is camp and it is clichéd. It is also terrific. The sequel, Red Lightning, is not quite as good as Red Thunder, but still terrific.
Collected Short Stories by John Varley.
The only reason I had the chance to write the recommendation for Red Thunder is that I happened upon John Varley’s short stories many years ago. Published in a variety of books, many of my favorites appear in collections titled The Barbie Murders, and The Persistence of Vision. What makes Varley’s short fiction terrific is the uniqueness of his ideas and the absolute normality he brings to them. In the story Bagatelle, a human being has been cyborged into a 50 kiloton nuclear bomb, deposited on the Moon colony’s busiest intersection, and begins announcing the time of his detonation. A vacationing Earth negotiator just happens to be on vacation three levels up. In The Barbie Murders, the same police chief that appears in Bagatelle has to deal with a murder of a member of The Temple of the Standardized Church by another member. The whole mess is captured on camera. The wee complication is that all 10,000 plus members of The Standardized Church are completely identical….every single physical feature has been “standardized” through medico technology (hence the nickname “Barbies”) and they share all experiences through the practice of group assemblies. It turns out to be an interesting investigation.
In many of his stories, the backdrop for society is the fact that earth has been taken over by the “Invaders”, beings who believe that cetaceans (whales and dolphins) are a higher form of intelligence than Homo Sapiens. The Invaders are unseen, but clearly felt. Human technology ceases to work, agriculture fails, and all the humans that do not escape earth (or are already colonizing the Moon and Mars) starve to death within 5 years. All the planets, their moons, and their rings become the humanity’s new home – but there is no going back to the green hills of Earth.
Other ideas that permeate Varley’s stories include the concept of the Symb. The Symb (the symbiotic space environment organism) is a plant based entity that bonds with a human to create a closed system capable of sustaining both lives in the harsh but beautiful environment of Saturn’s rings. Sounds neat, but the wrinkle is that you not only have to share your entire body, but you have to share your brain as well and with an entity that some consider sentient. Also, Varley’s characters change sex with the same ease that we change hats…one day a man, one day a woman. This tends to create some interesting relationships among best friends and parents – or should I say parent, as in Varley’s world, its one person, one child and the family unit is biological mother and child. No one knows (or much cares) who the father is – fatherhood is a concept with legal and biological meaning or standing.
If you want an uninhibited view of what human society might look like, try John Varley’s short stories. You will not be disappointed.
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