![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dsrtao_Red Lightning_, John Varley.
I love Varley's work. He's never published anything bad... although _Mammoth_ was not up to his usual standards.
That said, this homage to Heinlein is distinctly about current issues, and (hopefully) its allegory will cease to be intelligible within a decade. The predecessor story, _Red Thunder_, is not required reading, but it would make this one more interesting, as several characters have grown and changed in significant ways.
This book has a three-act structure which initially feels a bit disjointed, but eventually makes thematic sense. I won't describe it further, except to say that Varley succeeds in making Mars feel like a distinct culture, not a rehash of the US, without spending all that many words on it and almost without an infodump.
I love Varley's work. He's never published anything bad... although _Mammoth_ was not up to his usual standards.
That said, this homage to Heinlein is distinctly about current issues, and (hopefully) its allegory will cease to be intelligible within a decade. The predecessor story, _Red Thunder_, is not required reading, but it would make this one more interesting, as several characters have grown and changed in significant ways.
This book has a three-act structure which initially feels a bit disjointed, but eventually makes thematic sense. I won't describe it further, except to say that Varley succeeds in making Mars feel like a distinct culture, not a rehash of the US, without spending all that many words on it and almost without an infodump.
