Red Thunder, by John Varley. Ace, 2003, 411 pages.

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Libs in Space

by Timothy Sandefur

John Varley is my very favorite writer, a man of spectacular imagination and impeccable dramatic timing, who can make the most bizarre premise not only believable, but spellbinding. He stormed the science fiction magazines in the late 1970s with a series of short stories that brought him two Nebula Awards and three Hugo Awards. He published three anthologies ("The Persistence of Vision," "Blue Champagne," and "The Barbie Murders"), and five novels. His Gaia Trilogy novels, "Titan," "Wizard," and "Demon," are spectacular and compelling. "The Ophiuchi Hotline" continued his weirdly inventive "Eight Worlds" alternate universe, and "Millennium" — originally conceived in the 1970s as an outline for a film, and finally made into a two-and-a-half-star movie in the '80s — is a stroke of genius in the time-travel genre. Then he disappeared.

He had gone to Hollywood to write screenplays, but other than Millennium (and an excruciating massacre of one of his finest stories, "Overdrawn at the Memory Bank," starring Raul Julia), none were filmed. Finally, in 1992, he returned with Steel Beach, his best novel to date, full of the wild ingenuity, adventure, and drama that makes his work so special. It was followed by The Golden Globe, which won the Libertarian Futurist Society's Prometheus Award for best libertarian s.f. novel. At his best, Varley's writing is as smooth as glass (with jagged edges in all the right spots), so that you find you've read another 80 pages before you realize it. As Algis Budrys once wrote, "Varley feels that . . . the transaction is ultimately between the reader and the story, not with the author, who, if all is well, has done his job and has no need to intrude as a personality." His characters are strong and clever, independent but vulnerable, with a hint of the cynicism which is borne of deep idealism. The futures he imagines are far from spotless, nor are they bleak dystopias. Instead, Varley portrays a time which, like ours, suffers from the ills, and profits from the joys, of cultural evolution. In his "Eight Worlds" series, for instance, the characters can change sexes as easily as we change clothes — something which, no doubt, would mortify the conservatives who today dread the "dehumanizing" effects of genetic research. He doesn't condemn innovation, but he does not pretend that we can deal with innovation with painless ease, either. Thus the drama of his short story "Options" arises from the family stresses that result from a mother's decision to become male. The theme of Varley's finest work isn't to forewarn and prevent, but to show that we can only survive innovation by changing, not by framing a sappy nostalgia for the good old days, or longing for an unrealistically pristine tomorrow. Varley is a dynamist, and his work is what Nietzsche called yes-saying. "We waver," said Nietzsche, in Human, All Too Human, "but we must not become anxious about it, or surrender what has been newly won. Besides, we cannot go back to the old system; we have burned our bridges behind us. All that remains is to be brave, whatever may result. Let us step forward, let's get going!"

Set in the near future (unusual for Varley), "Red Thunder" focuses on a group of teenagers who stumble across a drunken former astronaut named Travis Broussard, whose family turns out to hold the secret of space exploration. When they discover that NASA's Mars mission is doomed, and that the Chinese mission will reach the planet first, the friends decide to construct their own ship from spare parts, to rescue the American astronauts, and beat the Chinese. The story is lively and the climax every bit as exciting as we have come to expect. It doesn't quite meet Varley's highest standard; it contains some awkward asides, moments that seem like sermonizing. At one point, when two characters get into a friendly "yo mamma so ugly" contest, Varley seems to fear the reader will be offended, and pauses to explain: "A little Racism 101 footnote. . . . " He adds similar asides elsewhere, serving no apparent purpose but to slip in editorial comments. But although these moments are unusually intrusive for Varley, they only last a sentence or two, and hardly spoil the novel.

The preaching is more obvious in some scenes where characters discuss their plans. Broussard spends four pages lecturing the band on the shortcomings of government space travel: "This country has never really had a 'space program.' What we've had is a series of races." The result, he concludes, has been huge, wasteful programs which wasted time, technology, and lives by going the fast, expensive, and dirty route:

"Say Columbus took the Apollo route to the New World. He starts off with three ships. Along about the Canary Islands he sinks the first ship, just throws it away deliberately. And it's his biggest ship. Come to the Bahamas, he throws away the second ship. He reaches the New World . . . but his ship can't land there. He lowers a lifeboat, sinks his third ship, and rows ashore. He picks up a few rocks on the beach and rows right back out to sea, across the Atlantic . . . and at the Strait of Gibraltar he sinks the lifeboat and swims back to Spain with an inner tube around his shoulders."

It's awful to think that this was being printed when Columbia dissolved in flames in the western sky, killing seven astronauts and America's first reusable spacecraft. Varley's passion for space infuses "Red Thunder," and he is right: Americans should be the first on Mars. What's more, they should arrive, as Varley's ragtag astronauts do, in a Bigfoot pickup truck with an American flag wagging on the tip of its antenna. Exploration is not the product of bureaucracies, political agendas, and PowerPoint presentations. That sort of thing may plant a flag on the moon, just as it sent Lewis and Clark to the Pacific, but it cannot bring life to lifeless places. That can only be done by rugged individualists, people who are fanatics and starry-eyed idealists, whose word for "hubris" is "gumption." The Wright Brothers were weird obsessives who invented the airplane in their spare time, in their bicycle shop. Why shouldn't such people land on Mars as well?

Politicize space travel, and only politicians will travel in space. Rick Tumlinson of the Space Frontier Foundation imagines what it would have been like if America's western expansion had been run the way space is:

"A new Waggonautics and Wilder-nautics Agency is created to mange the frontier. . . . [G]overnment engineers [are] called in to develop a new Conestoga Wagon and Log Cabin capable of dealing with the extreme conditions encountered by the explorers. Some thirty years after the original expedition a small but relatively high tech cabin is reaching completion some hundred miles west of the Mississippi. Serviced by a completely self sufficient giant Conestoga Shuttle, the cabin faces delay after delay as government priorities shift, and there is doubt as to if it will ever be ready for its first four Wilder-nauts. As endless debates between engineers and scientists continue as to its usefulness, with some proposing the development of unmanned wagon trains to lower the risks to humans . . . an entire generation of potential pioneers are denied the chance to move out into the new world. . . ."

Americans should get to Mars first, and they should get there in a garage-built private spacecraft. Moreover, that's why they should be first. Ingenuity cannot be regimented; it is the possession of thousands of otherwise anonymous people with no political clout, and often with little ability to articulate their ideas. They crossed North America in the 19th century because they were tough and determined. Many never made it, and many who did were wild and unsavory characters. But they had something that made them stand out from the rest of the world. They're still around, tinkering in their garages on ideas that might some day take us into space, even though the Exploration Establishment would scoff at them. They're people like Richard Speck and his team at Micro-Space Inc., competitors for the X-Prize, a $10 million reward for the first privately built spacecraft to carry three people into space, return, and launch again within two weeks. They're people like Leik Myrabo, who has devised a way of boosting payloads to orbit on a column of laser light, which quickly heats the air underneath a mushroom-shaped booster, causing the air to explode and push the booster upward. They're people like Justin Kare, who proposes the ingenious idea of shooting laser-launched objects toward a spacecraft, which then blasts the objects with its own laser, and collects the transferred momentum in a magnetic sail.

Throughout his career, Varley has been compared to Robert Heinlein, a comparison he wears with pride, having written a screenplay for "Have Spacesuit, Will Travel," and putting countless references to Heinlein in "Steel Beach." "Red Thunder" is more clearly an homage, full of the youthful wonder at space travel which energizes Heinlein's best work and is the loveliest sentiment in s.f. In books like "Have Spacesuit" and "Rocket Ship Galileo," Heinlein told stories of average kids — a little nerdy, perhaps, easy to tease, but just like the kids who read his stories — who, through quirkiness, luck, and absolute devotion, manage to reach the stars they adore. Varley's novel recaptures that feeling, and thus seems a bit homey, or at least unrealistic. But is it? Consider the story of David Hahn, a Michigan Boy Scout who, in 1995, came close to building a nuclear reactor in the family's garden shed. "Sure," Harper's reported three years later, "they thought it was odd that David often wore a gas mask in the shed, and would sometimes discard his clothing after working there until two in the morning, but they chalked it up to their own limited education. [His stepfather] says that David tried to explain his experiments but that 'what he told me went right over my head.'" Hahn tried to construct a kind of reactor which government projects had given up as a lost cause decades before. But the 17-year-old "was determined to get as far as he could by trying to get his various radioisotopes to interact with one another. . . . [He] took the highly radioactive radium and americium out of their respective lead casings and, after another round of filing and pulverizing, mixed those isotopes with beryllium and aluminum shavings, all of which he wrapped in aluminum foil . . . and tenuously held together with duct tape."

With people like these, and ideas like these, there is no excuse for being Earth-bound in 2003. The future has been made by people like David: driven, curious misfits, creative in spite of themselves, and often in spite of authorities. Their rebellions can be amusing, self-destructive, or dangerously subversive. Sometimes their manner can reach the abusive extremes of the stereotypical suffering artist. Sometimes it can be the fevered obsession of the mad scientist. And sometimes it can be the epic vision of a Newton or an Einstein. There is no way for us to tell in advance. But in times and places where conformity and sacrifice have been the rule, the charismatic impulse of creativity has been made a political crime, and science has been driven under the machinery of the state. Professor Fang Lizhi, for example, who now teaches quantum theory at the University of Arizona, lived the life of a devoted Marxist in China, but he aroused suspicion when he rejected the Official Physics. "[T]he Chinese textbook I was studying," Fang told Popular Science, "quoted Lenin to say that the Copenhagen school [of atomic structure] was bourgeois and wrong. Bourgeois — that's nonsense . . . ! The result was that in 1957 I was expelled from the Party. So I couldn't hold on to my job." During the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, he was forced to drag farm carts like a donkey, because he was a "stinking intellectual." Yet he continued to study, secretly carrying a copy of Russian physicist Lev Landau's "Classical Theory of Fields." "I read it in the coal mine," he recalled.

Free nations, by contrast, suffer a thousand cranks and mediocrities for every good new idea. Visionaries and crackpots stand side-by-side, and many occupy both categories. Libertarians have traditionally had an affection for crackpots, precisely because we know that their wondrous flow of inventions, contentions, and hallucinations are the only real signs of life in any nation, and that the line between lunacy and genius is usually drawn only in retrospect. From the seeming randomness of Whitman's free verse poetry, to the butterfly-fast notes of Parker's modern jazz, to today's discomforting ideas about genetic manipulation or family relationships, a free society allows creativity, even though most new ideas end up being wrong, and many dangerous. Despite the preponderance of wrong and dangerous ideas, a free society allows creativity and eccentricity because every now and then, some new visionary with a little gumption and a lot of know-how comes up with an idea that changes everything — and then the rest of us say, "Now why didn't I think of that?" These are the sorts of people Varley is writing about — and writing for. They are the people who will take us to Mars . . . if we ever do go.

"Pioneers," writes the Micro-Space team, "whether mountain men or religious outcasts, computer hackers or web nerds, are peculiar people. They invest their lives and assets in the pursuit of their dreams, yet they can seldom tap government treasuries. All mankind eventually benefits, but those who lead the way into a frontier often walk alone." Private space exploration won't be any easier than the exploration of the West was. Frontiers are deadly places. But the question is whether Americans will have the guts to say yes to that challenge.

© Copyright 2008, Liberty Foundation

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