Red Lightning

Thunder and Lightning #2

by John Varley

“A cosmic coming-of-age novel… enthralling everyman heroics.”—Paul Di Filippo, SciFi.com

“Mars sucks.” And if anyone’s allowed to say it, Ray Garcia-Strickland is, since his father was one of the first men to set foot there. Ray’s father is now the manager of the Red Thunder, one of the swankiest hotels on overdeveloped Mars. And Ray has seen his share of gravity-dependent Earthies. Which doesn’t stop him from fearing the worst when Earth is struck by an unknown object, causing a massive tsunami. Living high on his father’s glory was okay, but now Ray must literally come down to Earth—and help solve one of its greatest mysteries…

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Space Opera, Fantasy, Young Adult, Speculative Fiction, Science Fiction Fantasy

355 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Full name: John Herbert Varley.

John Varley was born in Austin, Texas. He grew up in Fort Worth, Texas, moved to Port Arthur in 1957, and graduated from Nederland High School. He went to Michigan State University.

He has written several novels and numerous short stories.He has received both the Hugo and Nebula awards.

Reviews

[Bradley · Rating 4 out of 5]

As sequels go, when we jump a generation down the line and see how worlds have changed with the new technology, this isn't bad. It's a different kind of beast from Red Thunder.

That being said, it still focuses on character, relying more heavily on the mad scientist mcguffin than before, but that's merely to resolve the plot. I'll call that handwavium.

On the other hand, the full content of the novel is very much a coming of age with some rather heavy scenes that include some horrible disaster relief, so bad that it felt like a dystopian novel, all the way to greedy a-holes trying for power grabs between two planets.

Yes, this is an adventure that pulls off the now-traditional Mars revolution motif. Fortunately, it's also written well and light and still pays beautiful homage to Heinlein. Updated, of course. I very much recommend this for all you SF junkies who want a taste of that.

[Shawn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Definitely a YA book from an author who can write non-YA. Not great, not terrible, not really entertaining, or interesting, but somewhere along the way a story is spun. Didn’t think I’d read on after the first book, there was no suspense, and this second book was much the same. This is best read by young readers.

[Roger · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I have a series I want to read I often don't read what a particular book in that series is about-I look up the reading order to make sure I have that right but skimp on absorbing the details about individual books. So Red Lightning caught me flatfooted. A large portion of this novel takes place on an Earth ravaged by a disaster. I have lived through some disasters myself (no big deal I suspect many of the people reading this review can say the same thing) but it was still hard to read about. Despite that I soon found myself warming to Red Thunder-once we get past the "disaster" part of the book things move fast and there is a lot to delight an old science fictioneer like me. John Varley is crafting a multi generational epic and I look forward to seeing where he goes next.

[Sean Randall · Rating 4 out of 5]

We all know that often, sequels don't work as well as the original. here ... that just doesn't hold.

Varley's taken the idea behind the first story, forwarded us on to the next generation, and thrown complex, relevant and timely issues into a pot and bubbled them all up into a fantastic, readable adventure. I'm still a little disappointed at how long these teens take to open up to their feelings, but perhaps the more cautious nature is warranted in such a dangerous time. The ending paves the way neatly for any future works (of which I think there are at least two, so that should keep me happy).

[Aaron · Rating 4 out of 5]

More great stuff from my favourite author.

[Michael Pryor · Rating 3 out of 5]

Racy, pacey, satisfying.

[Kathy Davie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Second in the Red Thunder Young Adult science-fiction series set in a futuristic Earth, er, Mars.

As a result of Red Thunder (book one), man has colonized Mars and enjoys almost free, everlasting power thanks to Jubal Broussard. A man kept prisoner in the Falkland Islands as a "security measure" for his protection.

My Take
Another excellent read by Varley. Ray gets a lot more action and adventure that he could imagine. Struggling through the debris and bodies left behind by the tsunami to find Grandma. Surviving multiple invasions of Mars. Evading corporate mercenaries intent on finding Jubal before the others. Figuring a way out from under a mess of universal proportions. Let alone the fascinating ideas Varley promotes for free energy and the black hole concept of refrigeration! Damn, I want one of them!

This story has two parts both of which revolve around Jubal. In the first half, some thing from space suddenly strikes and skids along the Earth starting up a tsunami of disastrous proportions taking out the East Coast and the Caribbean. Even worse, it wipes out Florida where Grandma Garcia is still tending the Blast Off motel. Terrified, the Strickland-Garcia family heads back to Earth determined to find Grandma and Aunt Maria with Travis' help.

The second half is a corporate invasion of Mars looking for Jubal and the mercenaries have no qualms about using torture to find out what they want from the Strickland-Garcias and anyone else they believe may have had interaction with Jubal.

Ray, Manny and Kelly's son (the main characters of Red Thunder), is the central hero for this installment. Seventeen, Ray is interested in all the usual teen pursuits: riding his board—between Phobos and Mars, his stereo, and girls. Being a Strickland-Garcia, Ray also wants some adventure. Something he's about to get in spades.

The Cover and Title
The cover is very sleek with its casino rocket ship hovering between Earth and Mars after all, tourism is the name of the game on Mars.

I'm not sure where the title comes from though. Okay, the Red is the series name and Mars is obviously red but Lightning???

[Jen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I seem to be on a genre-fiction kick, and this was a satisfying dose of exactly what I was looking for. Varley knows how to write a good story with interesting characters and some surprising twists. Near-future Mars is completely believeable. This medium-length yarn packs in a tsunami (on earth), an invasion, and a revolution.

Also, left me wanting to look for a copy of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Heinlein fans will recognize a lot here - both in themes and characters - and I say that in the most appreciative way.

This is the middle book of three. I haven't read the first, but the third is on my "to read" pile.

[Tamahome]

Read the first chapter. Seems fun. From a young guy's point of view, living on Mars. Classic first line: "Mars sucks." Seems in that juvenile Heinlein tradition. Maybe I should find the first book in the series. Not on audible.

Pg 65/328 (kindle ver has page num's yay) (9 hr read time?) I'm a little disappointed they went back to earth. But there's been a big disaster with their earth relatives. Now their uncle is talking about oranges. Zzz. It was written post 9/11, so it's fairly timely.

Pg 109/328 They take a spaceship all the from Mars to Earth. Now the rest of the book they're driving across Florida? Oboy. Deceptive book cover by the way. There's not much space faring.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very well written YA coming of age tale with an excellent illustration of the law of unintended consequences. The challenge is that it feels like a short story and a novella that were pasted together rather than a single cohesive story.

[Aaron Boyd · Rating 2 out of 5]

Red Lightning: A Follow-Up to Red Thunder
John Varley's "Red Lightning" picks up 23 years after the events of "Red Thunder," where a ragtag group of misfits built and flew their own spaceship to Mars. In this sequel, the Red Planet has become a bustling hub for humans. People live in small habitations ( like houses) and go to work doing various tasks for Earth companies and governments. In this second book the main protagonist, Ray Garcia-Strickland, son of one of the original Mars pioneers, feels increasingly oppressed with the growing commercialization and rigid social order on the Red Planet. When a terrorist organization crashes into the Atlantic Ocean, triggering devastating tsunamis and plunging Earth and in turn Mars turns into chaos.
On Ray’s rescue attempt to hemp his family trapped in desperate situations on earth. Their goal: to locate and rescue Ray's family amidst the pandemonium and uncover the secrets behind the attack.
This book "Red Lightning" is a step up from the last book and is a true sci-fi adventure that takes the characters on a journey of a lifetime, gaining independence from Earth's iron grip and ushering a new era of space travel. The story tackles themes of environmental devastation, political upheaval, and the human cost of progress.

Even this is better than the last book another Deus ex machina happens right at the end from the ever hated character Bobby "Cajun" Thibodaux who know creates a Status Machine which an be used for food storage, long time human travel or a weapon for freezing your enemies to be left to drift in space forever.


Similar Thrills from Other Sci-Fi Worlds
If you enjoyed "Red Lightning," here are a few other authors and books that might scratch your sci-fi itch:
Andy Weir: His novels like "The Martian" and "Project Hail Mary" feature resourceful protagonists overcoming seemingly insurmountable challenges in space.
Cixin Liu: "The Three-Body Problem" and its sequels offer a mind-bending epic of interstellar conflict and humanity's place in the universe.
2011 The Expanse.: James S. A. Corey duo takes some pages from this book series

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

I came in the middle of this series-- so didn't know in advance the characters, etc. I don't think that really prevented me from enjoying this book, but if I read the first in the series I might have rated it differently.

Red Lightning suffers a bit from the author's desire to divide up his story into two distinct portions, either of which would have made a fine novel standing on its own merit. However, the story takes a distinct jump in direction a little more than halfway through. First, an object from space traveling extremely fast collides with the ocean wrecking worldwide havoc (Tsunamis and flooding, etc.).. Our hero from Mars goes back to Earth and in that section there is a very interesting storyline with a post-apocalyptic feel. The characters are trying to find and possibly rescue a relative and their adventures will remind a lot of folks of a Zombie-less episode of The Walking Dead-- just folks trying to survive! Varley writes this portion of the story very well-- though the mystery of what the object actually was remains unsolved, though there are some ideas.

Then the author takes the survivors back to Mars and the story becomes an entirely different type of story. Earth has sent invaders because they think that there is a link to the residents and the object (and of course, there is) and from there we find that the people of Earth are no match for one of our most interesting characters (who reminded me of Eugene from the Walking Dead-- an autistic genius who was the architect of insterstellar travel and a whole lot of other technological advances).... Sort of a rebellion on Mars story mish-mashed on top of the survivalist adventure.

By the time I was through, I felt that the book had lost its interstellar warp engines and was veering about erratically. A cut above mediocre Science Fiction, but only a cut above.

[Kevin Phyland · Rating 3 out of 5]

Set several years after the events of the first book, Red Thunder, where astronaut Travis Broussard was sheltering his savant cousin Jubal who had invented a device for unlimited energy known as a squeezer. The squeezer compactifies matter into a massless bubble which can then release the stored energy as required. Where this energy comes from is anybody’s guess. As the tale opens something travelling at 0.9999c strikes the Caribbean a glancing blow causing a huge tsunami which wreaks devastation on the coastal areas of a lot of the planet. It is speculated that it was an old spaceship on a suicide mission. Governments and civilization fractures and after rescuing an elderly relative in Florida, Broussard and a group of Martians return to the red planet. Suddenly the place is getting invaded by Earthies of unknown persuasions, possibly the conglomerate known as the Power Company, and they are searching for the recently escaped Jubal. Lots of action ensues as a hostile takeover of Mars is attempted. But Jubal has yet another rabbit to pull out of his hat…an object which stops time within it which he calls, with astonishing perspicacity, a stopper. Fairly episodic sequel with a YA flavour from John Varley but will still entertain you for a while.

[Lars Dradrach · Rating 3 out of 5]

Entertaining fast pace somewhat YA classic Sci-fi adventure:

Varley can definitely write a story and most of the book is pretty interesting in a The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress kind of way, there are just a few issues that bothers me:

1. It's actually 2 stories, the first which Varley started out with, is a classic catastrophe what-if novel, depicting an object from space hitting the sea-bed and causing a massive tsunami. The second story is the 2. novel in the Red Thunder series, which tries, not totally successfully, to encompass the tsunami story.

2. The mixture of the 2 stories causes some logic flaws like, why would a team of people who single-handedly built a spaceship and flew to mars, travel though a disaster area in the US in an old diesel powered truck.

3. The lone-hero gun-in-hand second-amendment attitude becomes a little tiring at times.

I'm probably going to read the 3. novel as well

[Barbara · Rating 3 out of 5]

This sequel to "Red Thunder" falls a little flat because it spends so much time on Earth. The characters in the previous novel and their children quickly depart from Mars to Earth to help the survivors of a huge tsunami caused by a large object from outer space striking Earth. The scope of the disaster and how many people came together to deal with it was interesting, but I was expecting a book about life on Mars.

Then soldiers from Earth attack Mars searching for the autistic genius who created the energy source used to get Americans to Mars in the previous novel. This genius has come up with a couple of new amazing inventions, but the major focus of this part of the novel is about he will escape being captured by the soldiers and negotiating over control of his inventions by threatening to cause a catastrophe. Unfortunately, space chases and space battles are my least favorite type of sci-fi.

Finally, this book is very YA. The narrator is a teenage boy who thinks he might be falling in love and is trying to figure out what he wants to do with his future.

[Noodle The Naughty Night Owl · Rating 5 out of 5]

9/10: Fantastic, left me wanting more.

Because when all is said and done, the only place that sucks more than Mars does, is the Earth.

A brilliant follow-up to the first very well done story.

This time it's Manny's son we're following, and it was just as good as the first POV.

There were some funny romantic bits...

Luckily, the gun went off before I did.

Some edge-of-your-seat that's so unfair/rooting for the protagonist bits...

His hand moved to the big dial that was connected to the wires that were connected to my balls, and I peed my pants.

And some revisits with favourite, lovable characters, like Travis...

Correct me if I’m wrong, Captain Shitbag on the SS Snotbucket, and all y’all on the other two ships, too.

I love it! Well worth the read.

[Frank Burns · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yay, more Varley. Another cracker. This one might seem a little disjointed to some. During the writing process he had real world parallels with 9/11, the Indonesian Tsunami and Katrina which kind of freaked him out. I feel that the synchronicity helped inform his writing here. The premise is one generation moved on from the previous book and studies the setting through the lens of that generation. How would they be given virtually free unlimited energy and the ability to go travel in space freely because of that. Again, the touchstone is Heinlein YA but again, this is a very adult book.

[Ted Goldstein · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an excellent sequel to Red Thunder, picking up the story with the main characters son, now a resident of Mars. This one really pulled me in quick and held me. His descriptions of a tsunami ravaged Florida was gripping and utterly believable in the context of Katrina ravaged New Orleans. It was one of those fun reads that left me wishing their was more when I reached the end. Again, his vision of the near future technology and politics is compelling and believable, complete with low gravity sex and drugs.

[Tim · Rating 3 out of 5]

It ended better than I thought it would. The cover shows two planets and a big spaceship. The first part of the book was a quick trip home to Florida checking on the family. It took it a while to get back to spaceships. I thought I was having a flashback to the Red Thunder. That started in Florida and stayed in Florida for such a long time. Luckily, I kept reading and didn't swap to something else. It got better and ended well.

[Mark White · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit of a disappointment, this is an odd mix. There's a big chunk of the story takes place in a tsunami disaster area, that seems divorced from the rest. Then the remainder is standard space opera. In Red Thunder it was easier to identify with everyday characters trying to get into space. In this second instalment the characters have personal spacecraft, unlimited resources and technology that may as well be magic. Competent, but not much appeal for me.

[Mikal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Varley specializes in episodic, comedic adventures that take serious turns in all the right places. This books oozes with meditations on post 9/11 American security theater, colonialism, and home. The notes of home resonate deeply, so I found myself in tears at the end. Highly recommended to read, as is most of Varley’s work.

[Larry James · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good to finish out the trilogy. Perhaps my growing up with star wars, but i ended up reading them #3, #1 and #2. Each volume was complete enough to stand alone, with some background that was filled in from previous volumes. Varley is a dependable storyteller and the series is a good tribute to Heinlein.

[Rod Hyatt · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's a delightful easy read with fun characters and great imagination of what life on Mars might as well be someday. I can see how the author will continue the story. It was interesting to read the author's notes at the end about how his storyline thinking paralleled actual events. Scared him somewhat that he moved locations to not interfere with real history that was happening

[David Nadas · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of those great sci-fi novels that makes you think--okay... this could happen. The reality is, it can happen as early as 2029, on April 13th (Friday), when the Asteroid, Apophis will come within 20,000 miles of Earth. So far, NASA has deemed this asteroid a "no issue." That is because no one on the NASA asteroid team read this novel.

[Mark Zodda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyable follow-up to Red Thunder that in some ways improved upon the first in the series. I liked that this time the story tied things up better than the first which left me feeling that the story wasn't complete along with an ending that felt rushed. Overall a very good read.

[Brendan Powell · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great sequel to Red Thunder ... Mr. Varley does a great job of providing just enough science, to make the science fiction enjoyable, without turning it into a quantum physics lecture. Looking forward to the next installment.

[Saugat · Rating 5 out of 5]

This story continues from where Red Thunder left off and its in the same vein as the original. I really liked the author's note at the end trying to explain the circumstances. I think that change really makes the story stand out. onto the third one.

[Linda Mullaney · Rating 5 out of 5]

This sequel rocks

All I can say is the story not only continues, it gets better. The main characters from the first book return, but the narrator is from a new generation. The crisp writing and the action and backstories are superb. I'm looking forward to the next one.

[Liana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very good story! Reminiscent of Heinlein

[Webcowgirl · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyable, mostly.