Review: Variable Star

Just fin­ished Vari­able Star by Robert A. Hein­lein and Spi­der Robin­son. It is a sci-fi book that was out­lined by Robert A. Hein­lein before he died, and then fleshed out by Spi­der Robin­son many years later.

SPOILER WARNING!

The premise is pretty good. A poor col­lege stu­dent finds out that his sup­pos­edly equally-poor col­lege stu­dent girl­friend is a mem­ber of one of the rich­est fam­i­lies in the solar sys­tem. To escape the life they have planned out for him, he hops on a colony ship head­ing dozens of light years away.

Things are going rel­a­tively well until Sol (our sun) explodes, killing every­one and every­thing except for a few colonies and the colony ship that the pro­tag­o­nist is on. To make mat­ters worse, an engi­neer that keeps the ship run­ning com­mits sui­cide, leav­ing the ship stranded in space.

This is where things break down. Like the last book I read, it feels a lot like the author wrote a good story, but then got him­self in a hole and couldn’t fig­ure out how to get out of it. The end­ing doesn’t make any sense, because it is based entirely on sev­eral highly intel­li­gent main char­ac­ters being com­pletely igno­rant of what should have been com­pletely obvi­ous to them.

Over­all, a good read though.