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The first SF book John Varley ever read was Robert A. Heinlein's Red Planet. Red Thunder is his tribute to that book, Rocket Ship Galileo, Have Spacesuit -- Will Travel, and all the other wonderful Heinlein juveniles that SF readers of a certain age cut their teeth on.

Anyway, as you've probably figured out, a bunch of likeable Florida teens get together and build a homemade spaceship, a couple decades from now, with the help of a cashiered NASA astronaut and his idiot-savant cousin, Jubal, who has discovered a simple vacuum-energy shunt. With free, unlimited energy, just about anything can fly, even a spaceship made of used railroad tank-cars...

OK, the framing plot doesn't bear close inspection, and the air kinda leaks out of the tale once Red Thunder lifts off, but for 3/4 of the book Red Thunder is GREAT, the Pure Quill, a delight to read. The kid's spaceship would work, given the One Impossible Thing that makes this SF. The other problems of spaceflight were solved long ago, and if you could fly to Mars and back in a week, you wouldn't need sophisticated life support. Watching the crew solve the practical problems of building a spaceship in their garage -- actually a large, vacant warehouse -- and on a tight budget (dollars & time -- see ¹) makes for classic golden-age SF.

Once they get to Mars, the story turns perfunctory, as if Varley lost interest. The Chinese and American astronauts are pure cardboard. There's the obligatory Space Rescue, for high drama. There's an oddly-anachronistic bit of Red-baiting, which I found distasteful. Then the return home, to fame and riches. Eh.

Varley's too good a writer to leave the downside of Free Energy! unexamined, and he tosses in a neat bit from Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination, but his solution to keeping the dirt-cheap megatons (PyrE) away from the bad guys, while it might work, reads like a United Nations press release. Better to have left that to our imagination, I think. In fact, if I'd been Varley's stern editor, I'd have ended the novel when Red Thunder lands on Mars, and summarized everything that happened later in the Epilogue.

Still, there's more than enough Right Stuff here to make Red Thunder worth reading, though long-time Varley fans may find the book a bit of a letdown. Better, perhaps, to ignore the famous name, and enjoy the tale for what it is, a fine, flawed, nostalgic remake of a childhood classic.

Pete Tillman has been reading SF for better than 40 years now. He reviews SF -- and other books -- for Usenet, "Under the Covers", Infinity-Plus, Dark Planet, and SF Site. He's a mineral exploration geologist based in Arizona. More of his reviews are posted at www.silcom.com/~manatee/reviewer.html#tillman .