Variable Star

For much of his writing career, Robert Heinlein wrote one juvenile a year, timed to be published for the Christmas shopping season. Some of them (e.g. Citizen of the Galaxy) are among his best work. This book would have been one of them, except that he wrote a couple of chapters and put it in a drawer and never finished it. After his death, his widow gave it to Spider Robinson, a young writer in Heinlein's tradition, to finish, and this is the result.

It reads a great deal like the other Heinlein juveniles, with some of the really out-of-date descriptions of computers on spaceships brought up to date. (Remember in Time for the Stars when the spaceship might not have been able to get home because someone had destroyed the logarithm tables?)

The beginning, when the protagonist is 18, could have been marketed as a juvenile even in the 50's. He does some growing up in the next 5 years on the spaceship, but even so, there isn't so much "adult" content that it couldn't be a juvenile by current standards. However, it got long enough, and the market for Heinlein juveniles is old enough, that Tor probably didn't really consider marketing it as a Juvenile.

A lot of the themes Heinlein used -- stand up to powerful, rich people; space travel is necessary because Earth might not last, a spaceship with a few hundred poeple on it develops its own culture and social life -- are still there. An addition I enjoyed is that the main character is a musician, and his psychological ups and downs affect his playing.

So if you've liked the Heinlein Juveniles, you'll enjoy this one. If you like Spider Robinson's other books, you'll enjoy this one. If you haven't read either, but like books about humans colonizing space, you'll like it.

Related posts:

1. Hugo Award Voting
2. Agent to the Stars, by John Scalzi
3. Read the other stuff I’ve written this morning