Variable Star

Robert Heinlein was not a master prose stylist, but could tell a good story. Spider Robinson has some good plot ideas, but his story-telling can occasionally be predictable. That means Variable Star, the novel Robinson wrote from an extensive outline left by Heinlein, has some problems. It's a bit jarring, like a Frank Geary execution of a Frank Lloyd Wright design, or Kevin Kline performing a role written for Kevin Spacey. However, it is a good story: Young man flees earth for a new star system after he discovers that the woman he's been dating is actually secretly the heiress to the largest fortune in the solar system. He has adventures on the starship, gets to practice both his farming skills and his saxophone-playing ones. Disasters happen on-board and back around Sol, and he manages to cope with all of them, accepting the quest, completing the hero's journey, and rescuing the maiden. Robinson makes one annoying mistake, which completely ruins the urgency of the latter part of the story: an explosion in a vacuum should dissappate its energy with the cube of the distance. Thus, at ten light years away, the force of the explosion would only be a thousandth of the initial blast, and of little worry.

As a side note, Robinson Tuckerizes character names in a way that Heinlein never would have: The ship's captain is named James Bean; one of the ship's navigators prefers to be called George R; the ship in question is the RSS Charles Sheffield; and the colony's governor-general is a self-assured guy from a well-heeled family named Lawrence Cott, whose husband is named Perry Jarnell --- I had to see those names in proximity to realize any similarities to Laurence van Cott Niven and Jerry E Pournelle, PhD are probably just coincidental. Most interestingly, the girl our hero runs away from is named Jinny, who, in the end, turns out not to share many of Mrs Heinlein's virtues.