tigertoy

I'm starting to pile up a stack of books again. First for today is Red Thunder by John Varley.

This is the third in the series that started with Red Thunder and continued with Red Lightning. The main character is new, but the world carries over from the earlier books and may not be very clear. From the way this one ended, it looks like the end, but he might either follow a hook that he hinted at and then left lying, or else follow along after major transitions.

There are cosmic events in this book, but most of the pages are devoted to the trials and tribulations of being a touring celebrity and pop star -- as far as I'm concerned a whole lot of pages with very little content. Aside from that, we have another disaster, where we spend some time dwelling on how much disasters suck, though not as much as we did in Red Lightning, and it leads up to an ending that's pretty depressing. There's also a consistency error with the series MacGuffin that made me feel like the writer is cheating and just doing whatever he feels like with his magic technology.

Page by page it's readable, but overall pretty disappointing. Not recommended unless you really liked the earlier books in the series. 5 out of 10.

( plot summary )

Today's book review is Red Lightning by John Varley.

This is a sequel to Red Thunder. It's mostly self-contained, but the technological McGuffin is explained more in the first one, and some of the characters carry over, though there is a generation between the two books.

The story starts with a major disaster on Earth and devotes an excessive number of pages to just how horrible the disaster would be. Then a strange series of consequences from the disaster create an exciting but not very sensible plot. I guess a lot of of the plot really does follow from the initial assumptions, but the way it unfolds points up how unrealistic those assumptions are. There's some pointed and on-point criticism of the nature of our government (which is especially interesting to read in light of the fact that in the afterword, Varley claims that he had already written the book before Katrina; if so, he was chillingly prophetic).

( plot summary )

The writing from scene to scene is quite good, there's some fine adventure, and there's some good political points, but the plot holes are so big that the story fails to hang together as a sensible whole. I can't really recommend it. 6 out of 10.

Today's book review is Mammoth by John Varley.

I should really hate this book. It's a travel-into-your-own-past time travel story. Worse than that, it actually devotes a noticeable chunk of the story to trying to explain away the assinity of the Time Plot with the argument that time is too complex for our puny human minds to comprehend mathematically, so we can forget that a paradox is logic's way of telling you you fucked up in setting up the problem. (The assumption of time travel leads to paradoxes, therefore the assumption is false, end of discussion.) Varley almost goes for the predestination explanation (time travel into your own past creates no paradoxes if all of time is an immutable predetermined lump; you can travel into the past because you always did, but you don't have free will to change your mind), but then apparently has characters choose to do what they must to avoid paradox. But having the choice is completely untenable, whether you exercise it or not. I should have thrown this book across the room in disgust, but I didn't. So I'll stop ranting about time travel and get back to the book.

This book manages to succeed because it's humorous and lighthearted enough that I didn't have to be annoyed by the time travel. It's a nice bouncy adventure story, with a plot twist that really surprised me, but made for a much better story than what I thought I'd seen coming. I think Varley is trying to slip in a message about the true intelligence of the supergenius and the true wealth of the superbillionaire, but to consider these things would be to find the book serious enough that the time travel was unforgivable. So I'll let myself consider it a fun piece of fluff, and give it an 8 out of 10.

Today's book review is The John Varley Reader: Thirty Years of Short Fiction, written, edited, and with introductions by John Varley.

Despite not being a terribly prolific author, Variey is, I think, generally acknowledged as an important SF writer. These stories remind me why. I thought, looking through the table of contents, that I had read a lot of the stories -- most of them are from The Persistence of Vision, The Barbie Murders, and Blue Champagne -- but as I read through the book, I found that most of the stories were fresh. And most of the stories are very good. I found a couple of them a little weak, but only a couple.

In addition to the stories, Varley includes an introduction for each story -- generally two or three pages. These introductions, together, tell a lot about an author I had known little about, and I found them very interesting and enjoyable reading. There's enough material in these introductions to make the book worth reading even if you do remember the stories that were published in those famous and widely read collections.

If you've lived under a rock for the last 30 years and aren't familiar with Varley, this is a good introduction. On the other hand, if you're a serious fan, the previously unpublished stories and the introductory material make it a must have. And if you're somewhere in between, it's a good excuse to re-read some very memorable stories, stories that may not be old enough to be called classics but will be when they're old enough. 9 out of 10.

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25	26	27	28	29	30	31

Book review: Rolling Thunder

Book review: Red Lightning

Book review: Mammoth

Book review: The John Varley Reader

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January 2026

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