anny Garcia and Dak Sinclair are space-struck young men, just out of high school during the year 2010. Their girlfriends—Kelly and Alicia, two sharp-witted and multitalented women—are indulgent, acknowledging the glory and value of space flight without being quite so fanatical about it. But the whole world is indeed space-besotted, since competing Chinese and American missions are on their way to Mars at the moment. But the Chinese seem likely to land first, and that brings Dak and Manny down a little. Nothing yet hints to the quartet of teens that within six months they themselves will rocketing through space in a wild, unauthorized attempt to beat all governments to the Red Planet.
Out for a nighttime drive on the Florida beach near their home of Daytona, the foursome nearly run over the drunken figure of Travis Broussard. Some days after getting the unconscious man safely home, the four teens pay him a visit. Travis is an ex-astronaut, cashiered for his drinking problems. He lives with a cousin, Jubal, who is a kind of idiot savant. The six unlikely acquaintances soon become fast friends. Then, one day, Jubal offhandedly unveils an invention: a kind of stasis bubble that provides, among other things, unlimited power for free. Almost before they realize what they intend, the six are planning to build a backyard spaceship and head for Mars. A prime impulse in their trip is the discovery that the United States Mars mission carries a fatal flaw. Someone has to be ready to mount a rescue.
Thanks to the fortune accumulated by Travis and Jubal in the patenting of some of Jubal's previous inventions, as well as a million dollars from rich-girl Kelly's trust fund and the expertise of the multifarious Broussard clan, the construction of the ship Red Thunder is soon underway. Travis is sobered up, Alicia is training as the ship's EMT, and Kelly is using her business expertise to schedule the project. Gearhead Dak is busy constructing a Mars rover, and Manny is welding, testing surplus Soviet spacesuits, and trying to reassure his mother that they're not all bound on a suicide mission. As FBI men scour Florida for the secret of who set off various bubble-powered test rockets, the race toward liftoff accelerates. Taking off right out of the grip of the authorities, the crew of Red Thunder find themselves at the center of a media hurricane. And that's before their real exploits even begin.
All the old tropes are new again
This book is unlike anything John Varley has previously written, and yet it bears all the hallmarks of his past work, work that has always exhibited startling ideas, pellucid prose, amiable characters, a gorgeous specificity of detail and a sense of honest victories achieved at real costs. The main difference here is that instead of taking place in the far reaches of a well-settled solar system full of posthumans, the book transpires on the day after tomorrow, among people like you and me, a venue in which Varley can exercise a satirical wit and in which he can make some trenchant observations about society in general. Dedicated to the master of such topical tomorrows, Robert Heinlein (and to Spider Robinson as well), this novel also pays allegiance to the comic capers of Carl Hiaasen (a "Hiaasen Landscapers" reference in Chapter 9 should be the tipoff).
The first immediate virtue of the book is Varley's choice of Manny Garcia as first-person narrator. Manny is an utterly engaging fellow, the son of a widowed mother who runs the Blast-Off Motel, a down-at-the-heels place just this side of bankrupt. His native smarts, ambition and gusto for life make him the perfect narrator to recount the amazing tale of a spaceship assembled on the cheap and the heroic actions later undertaken by the crew. He's a fine mix of naivete and sophistication, bravado and trepidation. Varley's rendition of his voice never falters. And the other characters are equally well drawn, meshing and occasionally clashing to good effect.
Varley wisely devotes a full two-thirds of the book to the Earthbound action, saving the interplanetary adventure for the final third. This slow, deliberate buildup allows the drama of the final section to acquire fuller resonance. We've lived the building of the ship with all the cast in a way that makes their space heroics more resonant and meaningful. Varley's sharp eye for the way the world functions—from the renting of warehouses to the media blitz—makes us trust his more speculative moments. And by limiting his invention in the classic Wellsian mode to merely one hypothetical—the creation of the stasis bubble—he cloaks his "impossible" tale in utter verisimilitude.
Never one to shirk the ultimate implications of his dreams, Varley supplies a coda describing the world 10 years after the flight of Red Thunder. In this soaring final chapter, Varley lauds the unconquerable human spirit of exploration. But it's just frosting on the rich cake of practical, visionary, comic adventure he's already supplied in full.
