When Robert Heinlein died, he left an outline for Variable Star. Spider Robinson, who’d been a friend of Heinlein’s, was chosen to take the outline and flesh it out into a full novel. The story revolves around the life of Joel Johnston, a young man who has just learned that the woman he loves isn’t quite what she seems to be.

After a discussion in which Joel admits that he wants to marry Jinny, but not while they’re both broke, Jinny reveals a secret — she’s actually the granddaughter of the world’s richest and most powerful man. Still in shock, Joel meets her father and grandfather, who both seem to approve of the idea of the two getting married. However, by marrying Jinny, Joel would be signing up for more than marriage — he would also have to agree to give up his current plans for his life (he’s a musician and composer) to become a businessman, something he has no particular desire to do. Finding this unacceptable, Joel panics, and as a result of a drunken bender, ends up on a colony ship heading for a planet many light years away.

I got this as an audio book from Audible.com, and honestly enjoyed it quite a bit. Since I’ve read a number of Heinlein’s books and don’t remember the puns that popped up almost incessantly in this book, I’m guessing they’re a staple of Robinson’s. As a fan of Peter David’s, I’ve developed something of an appreciation for puns, and will be trying out some of Robinson’s other work shortly.

I only had two real complaints about this book.

First (and more minor) approximately two hours from the end, one of the ship’s “Relativists” (the people who make near-lightspeed travel possible) is attempting to calm several members of the crew after an almost unthinkable tragedy. In the course of his speech, he gives an extremely simplistic overview of the War on Terror (as seen from a liberal extremists perspective). Reviews I’d read had criticized other aspects of the book for their liberal bias (Joel’s running away to avoid becoming one of the world’s richest and most powerful men, for example), but this was the first one that really stood out to me, possibly because it had, at its core, some pretty major factual errors. Granted, this is a work of fiction, so it didn’t bother me much, but it was still a bit jarring.

Secondly, the end solution to the ship’s problems seemed very much like a deus ex machina. It wasn’t quite as bad as I feared when the solution first made itself obvious — it doesn’t play out quite as simply as one might think — but it’s still pretty jarring and sudden. Based on the afterword, I’m guessing that both the final crisis and its solution were not based on Heinlein’s initial outline (which ended in the middle), but on Robinson’s own plans to end the book (based on a couple of quotes from Heinlein, but not attached to this particular story).

When the final crisis occurred, I suddenly realized that I wasn’t going to get the Heinlein book that I had hoped this would be. I’d really hoped to see Joel get to his destination and actually get a feel for the sort of politics involved in establishing a new colony. That’s the sort of thing I always loved best about Heinlein’s work, and I was really disappointed not to get it here. The ending as it was wasn’t bad, but it didn’t seem to fit the beginning of the book as well as I would’ve liked.

All in all, this isn’t a bad book, and it’s encouraged me to look for more by Robinson, but I wish these two minor issues had been fixed.