John Varley is one of the landmark names in science fiction, a normally reliable and consistently enjoyable writer. His latest SF novel and first of the 21st century, "Red Thunder" will be a huge disappointment for anyone familiar with his recent books.

Essentially, "Red Thunder" is a reworking of Heinlein's "Rocket Ship Galileo", nominally set sometime in the next 20 or 30 years, but really set in about 40 years ago. "Red Thunder" is all plot, no speculation, no ideas, none of that fancy-schmancy literary stuff, and no characters.

There are a bunch of cardboard cut-outs who move around the board from one plot-contrivance to the next with the aim of building a rocket and racing it to Mars and back to make sure the first men to step foot are red-blooded Americans, not Red Chinese.

The setting is Central Florida, cribbed from a couple of Carl Hiaasen novels and "I Dream Of Jeannie", which combined with the flat characters, leaves the novel ringing as true as a paper-mache cowbell.

"Red Thunder" is just a rewriting of some of Robert A. Heinlein's "juveniles", and is an exercise in Boomer nostalgia. "Red Thunder" is a astounding failure, it clarifies for adults (unless they are in advanced and acute arrested development) that trying to update out-of-date genre fiction by search and replace doesn't work.

Following the recent WorldCon, Spider Robinson (who started this project collaborating with Varley) wondered why young people weren't interested in rocket ships and the space race. If shallow, stale, embarrassing crap like "Red Thunder" is the best traditional sci-fi hacks can offer, well, there's your answer. To quote from another piece of hackwork: "He's dead, Jim".