This week the planet Mars, in a playful break from its usual routine, will pass closer to Earth than it’s been in 60,000 years. Mars will be a mere 34.65 million miles away, which is, in space-type relations, close enough to poke with a broom handle.
It might even be close enough to reach in a vehicle cobbled together from welded railway tank cars that blasts off from New Smyrna Beach, a method that works just fine for the kids in John Varley’s new book, “Red Thunder.”
Mars as a topic for speculative fiction is not a new concept. After Edgar Rice Burroughs and Ray Bradbury and Orson Welles and Robert Heinlein and Frederic Brown and Bugs Bunny and Ben Bova and Philip K. Dick and Kim Stanley Robinson and everybody else from Kurt Vonnegut to R. L. Stine has had a whack at it, what’s left to talk about? We know they need women, what more need be said?
If you’re author John Varley, quite a bit. For one thing, the story is set here in Daytona Beach.
Don’t expect to see yourself the way you might if somebody shot a movie here and you “happened” to walk by as they were filming the chase scene. There’s very little mention of local landmarks or businesses, hardly surprising since Varley lives in Oregon and admitted in a recent interview that he has spent “three days, total,” in Florida. But he obviously loves the place, or at least reads our crazy writers.
“Red Thunder” (Ace Books) is about some unusual space missions happening about ten years from now. The Chinese have launched the first manned mission to Mars and an American crew has been dispatched to follow them in a desperate effort to keep up the space race.
Manny Garcia and Dak Sinclair and their girlfriends Kelly and Alicia watch the American launch before four-wheeling back up the beach to Daytona when they run over a drunken guy half-buried in the sand. The guy turns out to be Travis Broussard, former golden boy astronaut who was cashiered from NASA for a slight drinking problem. After the kids take him home and meet his idiot savant half-brother Jubal, things get really weird.
See, Jubal invents things. He can’t help it. He just can’t ever think of practical applications for them, such as the fact that his invention for making Christmas decorations out of thin air could be used to produce limitless power and fuelless propulsion. Turns out that it’s good timing, since he’s been running the numbers on the Americans’ Mars voyage and thinks there’s an excellent chance it’ll blow up before it arrives or else miss Mars and keep on going. Of course, Broussard’s ex-wife is the captain of that mission.
Fortunately the new drive can get them there in about a week. The tough part is trying to build a space-worthy ship out of available parts without attracting too much attention. How does a civilian buy a spacesuit, anyway? Navigation equipment? Does Home Depot have plans for a DIY air lock? And, most harrowing of all — they have to get their parents’ permission to go.
If you’ve read any of John Varley’s other works — “Steel Beach,” “The Golden Globe,” the Gaean Trilogy, or the book “Millennium” which spawned a truly awful movie starring Kris Kristofferson and Cheryl Ladd — “Red Thunder” will still come as a surprise. The humor and the skillful way he makes you forget you’re reading a book are there in every line, but I was surprised at how much social commentary he snuck in.
As I said, there’s not a lot of specific mention of Daytona Beach. For one thing everyone refers to it as “Daytona,” which would annoy me more if most of the people here didn’t do that, too. Garcia’s family owns a beachside motel that was doing just fine before a high-rise condo took over the other side of A1A, and that seemed awfully familiar. The boys have to resist the lures of Spring Break while they download specs from NASA’s Web site. Even tougher than building a space ship in your backyard is hiding it from the police, the federal government, and worse, the media.
And what, exactly, would the effect be on the world if someone invented cheap and limitless power?
“Red Thunder” is well worth reading for the laugh-out loud humor, the careful attention to detail, the almost-sounds-possible construction, the loving tributes to Robert Heinlein (“Jubal, this is Manny, my best friend”), the white-knuckled tension during the flight itself, the little references to Florida favorites (keep an eye out for “Hiaasen Landscapers”), and the hilarious way they returned. But most of all, you need to go buy this so it’ll be popular and get optioned for a movie.
That way, when they film it here, I can sneak into the background during a chase scene.