author : John Varley

Contents (possible spoilers)

• In the Bowl. 1975

• The Phantom of Kansas. 1976

• Air Raid. 1977

• Retrograde Summer. 1975

• The Black Hole Passes. 1975

• In the Hall of the Martian Kings. 1977

• Gotta Sing, Gotta Dance. 1976

• Overdrawn at the Memory Bank. 1976

• The Persistence of Vision. 1978

Contents (possible spoilers)

• Bagatelle. 1974

• The Funhouse Effect. 1976

• The Barbie Murders. 1978

• Equinoctial. 1977

• Manikins. 1976

• Beatnik Bayou. 1980

• Good-Bye, Robinson Crusoe. 1977

• Lollipop and the Tar Baby. 1977

• Picnic on Nearside. 1974

Contents (possible spoilers)

• Lollipop and the Tar Baby. 1977

• The Pusher. 1981

• Blue Champagne. 1981

• Tango Charley and Foxtrot Romeo. 1985

• Options. 1979

• The Manhattan Phone Book (abridged). 1984

• The Unprocessed Word. 1985

• Press Enter []. 1984

Sparky Valentine is a 100 year old actor, plying his trade around the Solar System, usually just one step ahead of whatever passes for the law in his locale. But it's difficult building a fan-base when you keep having to change persona. Then, out beyond Pluto, he gets an offer he can't refuse: to play Lear in a new production back home on Luna -- if he can get there in time.

The plot, such as it is, is wafer thin, serving as an excuse for an exploration of the richly detailed Eight Worlds and their denizens' weird life-styles. (And there are definite nods to Heinlein's Double Star at times.) Although Varley doesn't promise consistency in his Eight World novels, all the standard stuff is here: almost complete control over the body's biology with gender changing being a comparatively simple transformation (Valentine has had his entire body surgically enhanced so that he can change his appearance to better play various parts), bizarre social arrangements, and a displaced humanity living in the Solar System but forbidden the Earth.

Just sit back and enjoy the tour, and revel in all the delicious details. The word mills of Varley might grind slowly, but they do grind exceeding fine.

Yes! Now, this is how space travel was always supposed to be: build a spaceship in your back yard, jump aboard, point it where you want to go, push the pedal to the metal, and, whoosh, three days later, you're on Mars! None of this malarkey about thrust, and delta-v, and fuel limits, and stuff.

Varley has given us a rip-roaring Golden Age space travel story, updated for the new millennium. The spaceship in question is built by a bunch of youngsters -- but they spend a million dollars on it, and have proper project management, surplus Russian space suits, an ex-astronaut adviser, and, most importantly, a space drive that uses newly discovered sufficiently advanced technology (that is, indistinguishable from magic). And there's sex, and racism, and alcoholism, and child abuse, and divorce -- but strictly as background to the plot: building that spaceship.

The vast majority of the book is one lovingly-created info-dump -- the spaceship doesn't even take off for 300 pages. But that info-dump is done in the best story-telling way (I'm trying not to say "Heinleinesque" ... and failing), and covers every little detail, from Florida swamp navigation, to celestial dynamics. I love some of the lateral thinking solutions they come up with -- look out for the in-flight cuisine!

The coincidences are huge (the kids just happen to nearly run over a washed up ex-astronaut, who's cousin just happens to have invented a space drive -- one of them just happens to have a trust fund to bank-roll the project -- and so on), but who cares? It's not that kind of story. Leaving aside the three things needed to make the story work (knowledge, money, and magic) the rest is very well grounded in a realistic-feeling world (depending on your precise definition of realistic, of course). And it is compulsive reading.

The kids who built the Mars spaceship in Red Thunder are now grown up, with kids of their own. Living on Mars, which is essentially a big tourist resort for bored Earthlings, Ray Garcia-Strickland is bored. But that doesn't last. A mysterious object hits the earth at near lightspeed, causing a massive tsunami that devastates the Caribbean and East coast of the USA -- including Florida, where Ray's Grandma still lives. The family return to Earth, to rescue her. Once done they return to Mars, which then suffers multiple inexplicable invasions by strange groups looking for the vanished Jubal, the only man who can build the new power sources. Ray has to decide where his loyalties lie.

Each individual scene has the Varley trademarks: the security measures the Martians have to go through to enter the USA are particularly funny (in a teeth-grindingly ironic sort of way). Yet the overall whole is rather disjointed. In a postscript, Varley says that he originally had the tsunami located in the Indian Ocean, but after December 2004 he decided that he couldn't subject the people of the region to a second one, even fictional, so rewrote that part with it relocated. That might account for some of the disjointedness. So, a good Varley, but not a great one.

The third generation in the saga of the first family on Mars. Here Patricia Kelly Elizabeth Podkayne Strickland-Garcia-Redmond, Poddy for short (although she's never read the book), gets to travel around the Solar System entertaining the Martian troops, before events even more cataclysmic than before cause dramatic changes in her lifestyle.

This is great rip-roaring fun, in an apocalyptic sort of way. It's essentially a book of two halves, a lot of relatively gentle scene setting, then the aftermath of the cataclysmic events. There are, of course, oodles of Heinlein references, some more overt than others. At one particularly apposite moment, we get

This is definitely funny in context (and you don't need to have read the Heinlein to get the joke). But towards the end, Varley manages to get what seems like every Heinlein juvenile title into the text, which is mildly amusing, but more distracting (not only as they appear, but also in anticipation) as we move towards the desperate climax.

There is a definite conclusion, but loads of loose ends, too. I'm hoping that this isn't a trilogy. I want to follow the exploits of this family further.

Howard Christian is the richest man in the world, and can afford to indulge in his hobbies. The current one is to clone a mammoth. But when his latest 12000 year old frozen mammoth is found along with a 12000 year old frozen human wearing a wristwatch he gets involved in something much more exciting: building a time machine.

This is fun, and with the wacky details one has come to expect from Varley, but without his usual depth. For example, when it comes to the scientist describing his problems with time travel, it feels a bit of a cop-out, as if Varley himself couldn't quite pull off the necessary techno-babble. But it's an interesting foray into the paradoxes of time travel, with a cast who are well aware of those very paradoxes, and into the lifestyle of mammoths, and of the super-rich.