Todo el universo es un escenario, y Sparkey Valentine es un actor itinerante. Se labra su camino de un planeta a otro como parte de una trouppe diversa, llevando a Shakespeare (bueno, al menos una versión) a los confines del sistema solar de la Tierra. Viajará por los mundos exteriores donde vagan miles de satélites artificiales, conglomerados de chatarra y rocas fundidos para albergar frágiles comunidades humanas. Aquí es donde Sparky trabaja, transformándose en joven o viejo, obeso o enjuto, hombre o mujer, con sólo alterar los implantes magnéticos de su piel.Se trata de un equipo indispensable para un actor... y para un estafador buscado por asesino; pues, aunque Sparky Valentine tenga música en su corazón, también se ha puesto precio a su cabeza. Pero su vagar galáctico de acerca cada vez más al hogar, a la justicia.... y a la verdad de su extraña y prolongada existencia.

This SF is well-nigh unclassifiable. For glorious reasons.

I mean, sure, you could call it a Heinleinesque romance in the vein of [b:Double Star|175324|Double Star|Robert A. Heinlein|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1327984434s/175324.jpg|2887127], or call it a thespian-ish thriller revolving an immensely popular child star turned murderer who has been on the run for 70 years, or you could call it the One Last Great Shakespearian tragedy.

I mean, damn, I'm caught thinking that this is as glorious as (and is) a great mashup of Alfred Bester's best book, [b:The Demolished Man|76740|The Demolished Man|Alfred Bester|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1360171879s/76740.jpg|1247570], and [b:The Stainless Steel Rat|64394|The Stainless Steel Rat (Stainless Steel Rat, #4)|Harry Harrison|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1328073906s/64394.jpg|824589], full of on-the-run acting, con-jobs, a little madness, and a LOT of Lear. :) And let's not forget to send Valentine across the full Solar System as we do it. :)

This book might rank up there with one of the best SF ever written. It breaks all molds and does its own glorious thing, never apologizing, never doing the expected thing. Flashbacks? Sure! Tons. Flashforwards? Fourth-wall breaking? Third-person, First-person, Second-Person? Yep. :) And you know what? It all works. :)

It has PERSONALITY. :)

Varley is one of the greats, indeed. Now, why the hell is this book relatively unknown? Sheesh. It's a travesty!!! ( )

Interesting, and (like all Varley books) well imagined. But somehow boring. Spent most of the book wondering where the story was.

The book tells two parallel yarns. One's of Kenneth (aka Sparky) Valentine's life around his 100th birthday (that milestone's important, but less than you'd usually think), traveling from the outer reaches of the Solar System to a gig as Lear on Luna. The other's about Sparky's twenty-year stint as an 8-year-old celebrity--how that began, and how it ended. The two plots merge at the end, as you'd expect, and much is explained. But while the story "makes sense," I'm not convinced it was worth telling.

First read this book when it was new, and I vaguely remembered it from that reading. On re-reading it's clear to me why the remembrance was vague. There's really nothing to remember. ( )

This book took some time to grow on me; I spent the first quarter waiting for some plot to develop; then once I got to Act II, I was plunged into Kenneth Valentine's back story and things took a different turn as we meet Valentine's father, a domineering and abusive personality. It changes the nature of the book, but we still veer between horror and humour as we return to Varley's wisecracking narrator.

Valentine roams the Solar System, doing whatever he must to survive and evade the law for a serious crime. He switches fairly effortlessly from actor to con man and back again, aided by a eidetic knowledge of the works of Shakespeare, a highly competant piece of luggage that seems very much like Pratchett's Luggage given a technological makeover, and a genetically enhanced dog.

We get more detail of Varley's Eight Worlds, mainly delivered in extended asides; it must be a good ten or more years since I read his previuous outing in this milieu, 'Steel Beach', but I quickly settled back into it (though it wasn't until I read other reviews that I realised that these two novels share a character).

One thing did stick out for me, however. For a human future set some five hundred years hence, for Kenneth Valentine drama mainly finished at the end of the Twentieth Century. I know that in this series, humanity has been exiled from Earth and scattered across the rest of the Solar System; and so there has been a reduction in the overall population, the survivors will have had other things to worry about other than writing plays, and the nostalgia industry, once the human populations had become settled and (sort of) secure, would become a major enterprise that would drive a lot of the entertainment and leisure industries. But experience also tells us that creatives will be creative no matter what the circumstances - even the Nazi concentration camps produced music, art and writing despite their objective of exploitation and extermination - so the comparative lack of new plays is noticeable as Valentine roams the Solar System. Building an artificial repertoire is a difficult trick to pull off convincingly, but its absence is equally noticeable. Are we supposed to think that Mankind (and I use that word very intentionally) has been so busy surviving and building new lives on a new frontier that people haven't had time to write and create new art? Yet the settled societies of Luna and some of the other more established Eight Worlds have had time to create amusement parks and an extensive video industry with all its trappings, so why is there very little sign of new art? Is it just a foible of Kenneth Valentine that nearly all his dramatic touchstones date from roughly the first half of the Twentieth Century?

We also get continual deii ex machina: the Luggage - sorry, the Pantechnicon - an AI-run spaceship, Valentine's dog and indeed a late revelation about Valentine himself all emerge to surprise the reader, though the last revelation introduces a topic that I don't recollect from other stories Varley set in the Eight Worlds, and so which rather feels dumped into the narrative.

Others have commented on Varley's indebtedness to Heinlein; certainly, I visualised the action of the book taking place in a Heinleinesque setting, and the rough-and-ready nature of the boondocks of the Solar Systerm suggests worlds full of competant men, all pioneers who need an itinerant thespian to bring Art into their otherwise blighted and empty lives. Later, Heinlein is directly referenced; and the Lunar Central Computer is a thinly-disguised Mycroft Holmes from 'The Moon is a Harsh Mistress'.

In other ways, this is a twenty-year-old novel and it shows. Attitudes are firmly stuck in the 1990s or earlier; there is a distinct lack of personal technology. This is noticeable but not intrusive. The richly-detailed story and the larger-than-life protagonist make up for this, but by the end there is a sense of all loose ends neatly tied up; perhaps too neatly. ( )

I keep reading Varley because I liked his earlier work so much. This one is my least favorite thus far. I'd have liked Valentine a lot better if his tone (and penchant for quoting theater and film) weren't exactly Hildy's in Steel Beach--put a paragraph of each side by side and you probably won't be able to differentiate between them. The editing seemed poor--to make one small but important point, "prop" guns that fire would clearly have been forbidden on Luna in Steel Beach, but elicit no outcry in this volume. In some ways, the very end of the book recycles the end of Steel Beach. I assume Varley's next will be Heinleiners in Space. ( )