The Red Brick Times

I Just read "Variable Star" by Robert A. Heinlein (RAH). Just another science fiction book, right? Sort of. It was written 51 years after it was conceived, and 18 years after the author died. Lest images of poltergeists dance in your heads, the ghost co-writer was actually Spider Robinson. After RAH's death in 1988, and Virginia Heinlein's death in 2003, an incomplete and unpublished book outline was discovered among RAH's files. Spider Robinson was tasked by the estate to write the book suggested by Heinlein's 1955 notes. Published in 2006, "Variable Star" contains not only the sympathetic characterizations that made Heinlein's novels so easy to walk into, but also the odd quirks and twists of Spider Robinson's people and plots. Robinson paints strong-opinioned and often disrespectful souls who laugh and emit egregious puns and make rude noises at the universe. The novel examines a future humankind's first toddling steps toward maturation, opening with the narrow life of an impoverished college student who falls in love and wants to get married, if only he had enough money to support a family. He discovers a secret about his intended, and stunned, runs away. With each step and plot twist, the view keeps expanding, while keeping the camera on our protagonist as he struggles and grows. The pages end with a like struggle for both physical and psychological survival by the human race. The outcome remains uncertain, depending entirely on the potentials of human ingenuity and effort.

Heinlein's characters are both sophisticated and naive in many ways. Robinson's characterizations in the "Callahan's Crosstime Saloon" series likewise eschew the darker side of human nature in favor of optimism and hope. There is plenty of conflict and tension in both Heinlein and Robinson works, but the reader is not left hopeless. Altogether a healthy trend and an anodyne against newspaper headlines and television infomercialism.

The book is worth reading both for entertainment and for its optimistic outlook. It is Moby Dick, Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver's Travels with interstellar flight thrown in for good measure. Reading it rewards the time invested.
Posted 8:06 PM by Andy (1) comments

       Comments:

Cool, I'll check it out.

I've thought (more than a few times) about adding a "recommended reading" page to the ol' RBT. I'd love to give, and especially get, a heads up on something I'd otherwise not have stumbled on myself.

# posted by  whatley : December 22, 2007 6:28 PM
 
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