Author: John Varley
Publisher: Penguin
Rating: WARTY!
John Varley was born quite close to where I live, and I have several of his books on my shelves. Admittedly it's been a long time since I've read anything by him, I cannot remember ever reading a work of Varley's which was as annoying and boring as this one turned out to be. This volume is part of his 'Thunder and Lightning' series, and was preceded by Red Thunder, Red Lightning, and Rolling Thunder, the latter of which I haven't read. The first two I found moderately entertaining but nothing to write home about. My favorite of Varley's is Steel Beach, by far, with his short story Millennium a close second.
While I was quite interested to see a fairly new novel from Varley in the library I was less thrilled to begin reading it, unfortunately. It features first person PoV, which is so unnatural as to be completely unbelievable unless it's very well done, and it's rarely done that well. In this case it was absurd. Even hyperthymesics don't have that good of a recall and unfortunately, they all-too-often pay for that memory with unpleasant functionality issues.
I skipped the prologue because I think prologues are ridiculous affectations. If it's worth telling, it's worth putting into chapter one or later. If the writer doesn't think it's worth a chapter, then I don't think it's worth reading! And as long as I'm complaining, Varley is known for hard sci-fi, but this volume read more like fantasy in some regards, most notably in relation to the 'ark' space craft in which his characters were traveling.
The ark's creator evidently financed it entirely his self, which means he must have been a trillionaire or something. He built it to look exactly like Earth inside (as far as was possible, of course!), including bringing up actual Earth homes, and populating the terrain with waterways and lakes, as well as food animals. I found that to be going way-the-hell too far beyond practical, and for me it detracted from the believability of this whole enterprise.
This story is set around the year 2100 and begins with some action - fake action. The main two characters are the Broussard twins (Star Trek Broussard collectors, anyone?). They're named Cassie and Polly. I thought this was for Castor and Pollux, but it's actually Pollyanna and with that I guessed - correctly - that her sister was Cassandra. They're playing a game called flycycle - which is nothing but a huge rip-off of Harry Potter's quidditch. Polly gets into trouble with her harness, and starts heading down for a crash. Cassie notes Polly's absence, manages to spot her falling, and goes to her aid.
So we have this totally unbelievable blow-by-blow account of Polly's dire straits, which was farcical because it was narrated by the person to whom it was happening. Seriously? I don't know why writers are so addicted to 1PoV. It doesn't get me involved or give immediacy to the story for me. It just makes me think over and over, how ridiculous and restricting the whole technique is, and how dumb the writer is for at once hog-tying themselves and putting the rest of us through this with them. It's particularly ridiculous when the narrator spews a ludicrous 'B' movie line like this: "...somewhere in there I had lost my helmet, and I didn't even remember it..." I seriously doubt you would remember remembering that if you were plummeting to your death....
The cover has a booster line from author Cory Doctorow: "There are few writers whose work I love more than John Varley's...". I was not impressed in my first outing with a work by Doctorow, but what these blurbs serve for me is to prove once again how truly far Big Publishing™ has its corporate head buried in its corporate ass. At the time, I don't know Cory Doctorow from some random guy across town. I have no more reason to trust his judgment than I do some miscellaneous woman standing in line for the bus. Why would I even care what he thinks - especially when his comment is so generic that he could have utterly detested this particular novel and still give that as an honest quote?
Not only is the 1PoV annoying, it's interrupted by annoying definitions, right there in the text, of cute buzzwords Varley has invented, such as 'flycycle'. All this to say that after only one chapter - five pages - I was really struggling to see how I was going to like this even as I was hoping that it would win me over - and soon, very soon!
The two girls walk home from the crash tossing banter back and forth - banter of a nature which suggests that Varley forgot that these were girls, and put boys' dialog in their mouths. But at least he has the guts to use 'masturbate', a word of which YA writers inexplicably live in mortal terror for some reason.
The twins live on a gigantic spacecraft which is essentially a two-mile diameter, six mile long cylinder, artificial gravity being provided by the rotation of the cylinder. Originally I had no idea what Varley meant with his mumbo jumbo about 'gravity' changing, dependent upon whether you go spin-ward or counter-spin-ward, but there are some weird effects come into play when you're dealing with fake gravity, as this article demonstrates.
This story is alternately told by Polly and Cassie, and they're the biggest chatterboxes ever, filling page after page with uninteresting drivel. It can be highly inappropriate, too. Their father, Jubal, has been sequestered in a "bubble" for reasons unexplained at the time, and when he comes out, he demands that they stop the ship. Instead of them actually doing that, or us getting an explanation as to why it's considered necessary, we're treated to some thirteen or fourteen straight pages of family history, which is not only boring, it kills the drama completely. When they finally decide to go see Uncle Travis, the completely whack inventor of the ark, it takes some fifteen pages of drivel to get there. I skipped most of those. This ain't no Steel Beach!
I managed to make it to roughly half-way through this when the never-ending flood of irrelevant and boring drivel replete with pseudo-intellectual lectures on physics rendered me incapable of proceeding. By then, I'd actually started hoping that this entire space craft would indeed do whatever it was they feared it would do, which was still pretty much unexplained even at that point. Ain't I a stinker? This is without a doubt the worst Varley I've ever read.
