Dark Lightning
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4.3 • 22 Ratings
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
Known for “superior science fiction” (The Philadelphia Inquirer), author John Varley returns to his Thunder and Lightning series with a novel of how one man’s volatile genius could alter a starship’s epic plunge into a future where human survival is just a theory…
On a voyage to New Earth, the starship Rolling Thunder is powered by an energy no one understands, except for its eccentric inventor Jubal Broussard. Like many of the ship’s inhabitants, Jubal rests in a state of suspended animation for years at a time, asleep yet never aging.
The moments when Jubal emerges from suspended animation are usually a cause for celebration for his family, including his twin daughters—Cassie and Polly—and their uncle who is captain of the Rolling Thunder. But this time, Jubal makes a shocking announcement…
The ship must stop, or everyone will die.
These words from the mission’s founder, the man responsible for the very existence of the Rolling Thunder, will send shock waves throughout the starship—and divide its passengers into those who believe and those who doubt. And it will be up to Cassie and Polly to stop a mutiny, discover the truth, and usher the ship into a new age of exploration…
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
On Rolling Thunder, a starship the size of a small mountain, twins Cassie and Polly live the mundane lives of utterly stereotypical teen girls from the 1950s: they're athletic, cute, bright, and obsessed with romance, and they refrain from alienating boys with unseemly displays of intelligence or competence. When inarticulate genius Jubal declares that the ship must stop or be destroyed by a newly discovered cosmic speed limit, his pronouncement triggers a crisis of confidence in Rolling Thunder's genteelly autocratic government. Mutineers ambush the adults, and the girls must stymie the insurrectionists before the ship is destroyed. This labored, second-rate pastiche of Robert Heinlein's YA fiction is archaic in sensibility and full of lengthy narrative-halting info-dumps that offer no hint of the brilliance Varley once displayed.
