It's the sincerest form of flattery, or at least that's what they say: Variable Star

The problem with having read a lot of sci-fi over the past fifteen years is that it often seems I've read all the good stuff. There are some incredible exceptions to that rule - see: Alastair Reynolds - but otherwise, unfamiliar sci-fi lit is a risky business for the reader. There's an awful lot of crap out there. Some days I feel daring, but lately I've been going with what I know, so when I saw Robert A. Heinlein's name on the cover of Variable Star, I took it home. However, Heinlein's wasn't the only name on the cover. Variable Star was written by Spider Robinson, some twenty years after Heinlein's death, when the executors of his estate came across a draft for a story they really wanted to read in completion. I would like to read the story Heinlein would have written, too; unfortunately, previous experience tells me Variable Star is not it.

The plot is classic Heinlein, involving interstellar colonization and young men, and for the first fifteen pages or so, the execution is excellent - Robinson's stated intention was to write the book Heinlein would have written, and within those fifteen pages, I would never guess that it wasn't written by the master. Unfortunately, the book takes a pretty sharp downturn, with the protagonist adopting a very contemporary form of immaturity as well as the false growth and false profound epiphanies that are meant to be his triumph. Think of Zach Braff's film Garden State, or any episode of Scrubs, and you'll get what I mean by that. However, the thing that makes Variable Star most unlike a Heinlein novel is that it contains somewhere between seven and eight times the swearing (this estimate is probably low). And it's that casual, thoughtless, "nothing better to say" sort of swearing, to boot - in other words, lazy, lousy writing.

Don't be fooled by Robert A. Heinlein's good name on the cover of Variable Star. Grab something he actually wrote, and don't look back.