Takes more than a third of the book to even get started. And then conflict-free "plot": teenage singer goes into stasis while aliens pop out of Europa and devastate Earth (why would cold planet creatures prefer hot earth over hotter Venus or cooler and closer planets like Jupiter? Our hero pops out of stasis and in her low twenties marries someone from her grandfather's generation. Wow. This raises the libertarian vibe to a creepy level. ( )

SF,ARC

Reread - Heinlein homage everywhere. Daughter had picked it up over Christmas and I grabbed an ebook of it. ( )

The plot picks us slowly in this third of the series, but I thought it was worth it for character development and world-building. The threat to Earth in this installment seemed more Niven than Heinlein. The conclusion, which acknowledges the unresolved arcs, points to a fourth novel, and indeed, Varley is apparently busy writing Dark Lightning. Varley's extra-story fun here is to weave in the titles of a number of Heinlein's juvenile and transitional novels, as well as something of the tone and character style. The character "Jubal" is joined by protagonist "Podkayne."

Varley's recent writing has the feel of a movie treatment, so it's not a surprise to read on his website that he is indeed working on a couple of novel-based screenplays. ( )

It took me a bit to get into the story line. I found the diary portion boring, but then I'm not a diary kinda person. I think the book could have been a bit shorter and more enjoyable to read. ( )

If John Scalzi's Old Man's War is Heinlein's Starship Troopers rewritten for a more modern age, then Rolling Thunder is Heinlein's Mars books (Podkayne of Mars, Farmer in the Sky, The Rolling Stones). It even features another Podkayne of a much more politically powerful and technologically advanced Mars. But she is still a perky, outgoing, talkative teenager who finds adventure wherever she travels.

We first see Podkayne as a military/cultural attache on Earth ravished by global warming and terrorists attacks. She is serving in Pismo Beach to fulfill all Martian's Martian year (1.88 Earth years) tour of military duty until she is called back to Mars by her grandmother's illness. But this is not a world were all illness is quickly fixed. Instead her grandmother is about to be put in a black bubble, the equivalent of a stasis box where all time and motion stops. Then, taking advantage her grandfather's military pull, Podkayne gets her real dream job, singing for the troops in the moons of Jupiter, especially Europa. She works hard and becomes more accomplished until she visits the strange crystal mountains there. There is some sort of long scale musical conversations between mountains, which Podkayne uses as the basis for a jazz piece. Unfortunately she is too close to them when they erupt from Europa and head towards Earth. She grabs her black bubble to save herself and wakes up ten years later.

Like later Heinlein there is a far amount of sex and a fair amount of inappropriate conclusions about how all women love sex, babies, and shopping. Still this is a fast paced novel with several interesting ethical and scientific questions that has less to dislike than the actual ramblings of Heinlein himself. I would suggest that you read the first two books in the series, but if you don't, this one will still be quite comprehensible. ( )