Thunder and Lightning Books in Order

Thunder and Lightning starts with one of Varley's most cheerful premises: if the official space program has stalled, why not build the ship yourself? In Red Thunder, a ragtag group of teenagers, oddballs, and one washed-up astronaut put together a homemade spacecraft from tanker cars and impossible optimism. Their target is Mars. Their timing is terrible. Their plan is even worse, at least on paper. That combination gives the series its energy from page one.

These books like to tinker.

Varley wrote the series with a younger audience in mind, and you can feel the old adventure-story DNA in it. The science is playful but not weightless, and the characters solve problems with engineering, nerve, and family loyalty rather than destiny. The first novel has the excitement of a backyard invention story scaled up to interplanetary size. After that, the series grows outward and forward through generations, turning one wild voyage into a family history spread across worlds.

The next books keep that family thread front and center. Red Lightning follows Ray Garcia-Strickland on a Mars that is no longer just a frontier, it is also a crowded, tourist-facing society with its own frustrations and ambitions. Rolling Thunder shifts to third-generation Martian Podkayne, whose military posting to Europa proves far more dangerous than the music-and-uniform dream she signed up for. Dark Lightning pushes even farther, following twins Cassie and Polly aboard the starship Rolling Thunder as the series reaches beyond the solar system.

Mars matters in these books. It starts as a goal, then becomes a home, then a place with its own myths, politics, and generational baggage. Earth is never fully stable in the background, and that tension gives the series more weight than the breezy opening might suggest. Varley likes to show how one generation's bold stunt becomes the next generation's normal life, and how that normal life still produces new crises, rivalries, and impossible projects.

What ties the whole series together is its sense of motion. These are family-centered science fiction adventures with a lot of banter, problem-solving, and practical ingenuity. They are lighter than the Eight Worlds books, but they are not slight. If you want Mars colonization, homemade tech, teenage viewpoints, and the feeling that tomorrow might belong to the people in the garage rather than the people in charge, Thunder and Lightning is Varley having a lot of fun.