Day 81: Red Thunder (6/9/2008)

There are a few things you should know about John Varley before reading his books. One is he is a good writer and has excellent character development, by the end of the book you generally care about their welfare and have a vested interest in seeing them succeed. The second, he is a Sci-Fi author along the lines of Robert Heinlien. He has a very approachable writing style and is amazingly prescient. The third is that he really dislikes NASA. This is the general theme of this book. Once again NASA has failed in it's attempt to get to MARS and the Americans will be beat by China (this is actually fact, the Chinese are on pace to beat the USA to Mars by about 4 to 5 years with the latest estimates). The basic premise of this book is that good old fashioned American know how and a fantastic new technology will allow for cheap, efficient power and space travel. So a small group of kids and an alcholic ex-astronaut along with his idiot-savant cousin have sixty days to build a space ship out of train cars and make it to Mars ahead of the Chinese. Sounds improbable but the power of Varley and Sci-Fi in general is that they make the unobtainable goal seem plausible.