For readers of my vintage, John Varley was a formative author. He drew on classic SF traditions but also embraced more contemporary concerns and trends. For example, he set his fiction in the Solar System as revealed by space probes, not in the Barsoomian planets of older SF. His settings featured newer tech and more forward-looking social mores1. Other authors had imagined space colonies; Varley imagined space colonies whose inhabitants were free to pursue self-actualization in quite unconventional ways.
Varley’s fiction was well received, as a look at his ISFDB page should make clear. Many awards!
It has been seven years since Varley’s most recent novel. Fame is fickle and younger readers may be unfamiliar with his works. For the Varley-curious, here follows a brief guide to his works, starting with the novels. Varley published three standalone novels and three series, as well as a cornucopia of stories (most of which are quite good and some of which are great). I will start with the standalone novels.
Millennium (1983)
Mistakes were made! Radiation-damaged, chemically mutated terrestrial humanity is doomed! Time travel offers an escape clause: viable colonists can be snatched just before the disasters in which history says they perished, and dispatched to the off-world colonies. It’s a perfect plan provided that none of the overworked teams responsible for doing the snatching make a fatal error, and as long as no investigators in the past prove all too canny. One slip and causality itself is imperiled.
This book took a toll on Varley. Actually, it wasn’t so much the book as it was the terrible movie based on it, and the experience Varley had working on the movie. Someone, I don’t remember who, once compared working in Hollywood to placing one’s testicles in a vise and being handed a hundred dollars to endure until the pain became unbearable. Pre-Millennium Varley was a much more optimistic writer than he was after this dire experience.
Mammoth (2005)
A frozen mammoth is an amazing discovery, but not as amazing as the two human corpses next to it, one of whom is wearing what appears to be a modern wristwatch. Time travel seems implausible but what other explanations can there be2? It’s up to a billionaire scientist to work out what happened.
You know, if I knew that some time traveller was going end up frozen in ice tens of thousands of years ago, the last thing I’d do is work on time travel. Let someone else look at an icesheet from the inside.
Slow Apocalypse (2012)
A well-meaning scientist successfully weans America off foreign oil through the simple expedient of an oil-destroying bioweapon. In less time than it takes to say “the sudden, brutal end of civilization,” the bioweapon spreads across the Earth, rendering all oil unusable and modern civilization as dead as a dodo. Screenwriter Dave Marshall lacks the necessary skills to keep himself and his family alive. Nevertheless, Dave is determined to try.
Eight Worlds
Aliens attack! Billions perish as terrestrial technology is suppressed! But that’s boring history to the protagonists of these books, who live long after the Invasion, on worlds overlooked by the Invaders. For these people, equipped with fantastically powerful technology, the post-Invasion era would be a golden age… if not for the need for plot.
The Eight Worlds novels fall into two sets: (1) The Ophiuchi Hotline, written contemporaneously with the Eight Worlds short stories (which I will get to later) and (2) the three later Metal novels.
Varley didn’t want to look at his old notes when he restarted the series after a long hiatus; as a result, there are many continuity glitches. I consider this a series with an asterisk. Perhaps not a series in the purest sense.
The Ophiuchi Hotline (1977)
The Eight Worlds are cheerfully transhumanist (aided by alien information provided by the hotline mentioned in the title) but there are limits. Prior to the novel’s beginning, protagonist Lilo was arrested, tried, and condemned for a capital crime involving human DNA. The penalty is as final a death as the Eight Worlds can arrange. Survival is possible but at a price: Lilo is sentenced to work for a zealot whose determination to drive the Invaders out of the Solar System is in no way inhibited by the fact that the Invaders possess nigh-godlike power, while humans do not.
Hotline marks Varley’s transition from writing mostly short fiction (where the money ain’t) to novels. IMHO, Hotline is a bit of a mess but at least it’s a very energetic mess, with several novels’ worth of ideas crammed into a slender 237 pages.
Steel Beach (1992)
After a long hiatus, Varley wrote three more Eight Worlds novels. They aren’t quite consistent with the first book and they are considerably more pessimistic. (Thanks, Millennium.) It makes sense to distinguish between Hotline and the last three books.
It’s been two centuries since the Invasion, long enough for space-based humanity to have solved every existential problem… so why are so many people miserable? Plucky reporter Hildy Johnson discovers mounting evidence suggesting that something has gone very wrong with lunar civilization. Whether that’s something a civilization entirely dependent on artificial life-support can survive remains to be seen.
The Golden Globe (1998)
Kenneth “Sparky” Valentine is a talented actor of dubious morals whose endless peregrinations across the Solar System are driven in part by his disinclination to discuss with police precisely how his father died, and even more so by the relentless Charonese assassins who dog his heels. It’s not a sustainable life, but escape seems impossible.
As revealed in flashbacks, Valentine comes by his profound flaws honestly, having had one of the most memorably awful fathers in science fiction.
Irontown Blues (2018)
After the Big Glitch, traumatized former cop Christopher Bach reinvented himself as a detective in the Philip Marlowe mold. Only problem: nobody on the Moon seems to need a PI, not even one with an adorable cybernetically enhanced dog like Sherlock. Bach is canny enough to realize that supposed client “Mary Smith” is lying about her name, and no doubt much more… but not the scale or purpose of her stratagems.
The Gaean Trilogy
This series comprises Titan (1979), Wizard (1980), and Demon (1984). They focus on former American astronaut Cirocco Jones and her troubled relationship with the moon-sized alien Gaea, who is both nigh-godlike and also barking mad.
Titan (1979)
The crew of the Ringmaster is delighted to discover a twelfth moon of Saturn. They are less delighted when on approach to the enigmatic object, Ringmaster is grabbed and dismantled and its crew kidnapped. Cirocco Jones wakes alone and naked inside what turns out to be an immense, living torus filled with a wonderous and diverse ecology. Finding her crewmates will not be easy3.
Wizard (1980)
Gaea offers humanity biotechnological miracles. Thus, where prudence might suggest avoiding or even destroying the 1,300-kilometer alien, humans prefer to trade with Gaea. Humans have nothing tangible to trade. Luckily, the bored god craves entertainment and humans are if nothing amusing. At least when prodded. It’s Jones’ unhappy lot to play intermediary between insufficiently prudent humans and a dubiously sane god.
Demon (1984)
Working for Gaea is sheer misery. Jones decides that the only way to free herself is to bring down Gaea. That may sound impossible but really, how hard could it to defeat a mad god?
Note that Wizard was written before Millennium; Demon came out after Varley had been put through the Hollywood wringer. Hence Wizard is much more cheerful than its sequel, Demon.
An interesting historical note: this series features many lesbians and bisexual women. That sort of inclusivity wasn’t often the case forty years ago. Unfortunately, these women seem to have been crafted to please a male gaze, but still may be of interest for those interested in LGBTQ+ representation in older SF. Just as an overall note, I should mention that not everything in Varley’s fiction has aged well, including the tendency of love interests to be alarmingly young, and readers may want to be aware of that along with the various merits of these works.
Thunder and Lightning
The Thunder and Lightning series is consciously retro, evoking the good old days when a single misunderstood genius could open up space, provide boundless cheap energy, and upend civilization… given only pluck, super-science, and a crew of teens. IMHO, it’s an attempt to emulate Heinlein4.
Red Thunder (2003)
An overlooked design flaw imperils Ares Seven, the first American expedition to Mars. The only way for help to reach the astronauts in time is for an inarticulate genius to invent an unprecedented space drive and for a collection of space-obsessed teens to kit-bash a spaceship together from spare parts. What are the odds of that succeeding?
Red Lightning (2006)
A generation after Red Thunder, Mars is a frontier no more, much to the distress of teen Ray Garcia-Strickland. What hope has he of interplanetary adventure? Be careful what you wish for: Ray gets all the excitement he could want when a relativistic object impacts Earth, endangering his terrestrial loved ones.
Rolling Thunder (2008)
This novel focuses on Ray’s daughter, a young Martian Navy lieutenant (who seems to be subtly modeled on Heinlein’s Podkayne). This younger Garcia-Strickland hates living on Earth. She hates dealing with the endless stream of Earthers who want to emigrate to Mars. The summons that calls her back to Mars is a welcome relief. The opportunity to venture on to Europa is even more promising… because neither Podkayne nor any other human suspects what’s waiting for humanity on Europa.
Dark Lightning (2014)
The starshipRolling Thunder sets out for the stars… only for Jubal, the man who gave humans cheap space and abundant power, to announce midtrip that the ship must halt mid-voyage or be destroyed. This proclamation sets in motion the inevitable fate of every generation ship: deep space mutiny! …Unless two plucky twins can somehow save the day.
Superheroes (1995)
In addition to the novels in the precis above and the short works I will discuss below, Varley edited a single anthology: Superheroes, co-edited with Ricia Mainhardt. I mention it for the sake of completeness, but it is an odd duck that I don’t think I ever reread—please chime in if you have!
The Short Works
As diverting as Varley’s novels could be, he made his mark as a short story writer. Unfortunately, such money as there is in writing is in novels. Thus, Varley pivoted to novels in the late 1970s. Despite the iron hand of the market, Varley still wrote an impressive body of short works. In fact, it’s to these short works I turn when I want to reread Varley. They are where I would recommend readers new to Varley should begin.
The shorts are too numerous to go through story by story—ALTHOUGH I COULD!—but my favourites include “Options” (a study of the early days of on-demand gender change), “Overdrawn at the Memory Bank” (a tale of holidays gone wrong, a frequent theme in early Varley), and “The Manhattan Phone Book (Abridged)” (a short but memorable exploration of what atomic war could mean to you).
A decade ago, I’d have advised readers new to Varley to snap up Good-Bye, Robinson Crusoe and Other Stories, and The John Varley Reader, which between them5 had almost every Varley short work. Alas, while Reader is still in print, Robinson Crusoe does not appear to be. Used copies can be had but they don’t seem to be cheap. As I see it, new readers should keep their eye out for the two collections above or the older trio of collections, The Persistence of Vision (1978), The Barbie Murders (1980) AKA Picnic on Nearside (1984), and Blue Champagne (1986). The older collections appeared as mass market paperbacks in an era of vast print runs, and should be easy to track down.
Or perhaps some publisher could release a comprehensive Varley collection. Hint, hint. It would be a fitting tribute. In the meantime, what are your favorites? Which novels or stories would you recommend to a first-time reader?
- In retrospect, those shiny futurist mores were merely 1970s hijinks with bigger tail fins. However, it was hard to notice that in the 1970s. Thank goodness that modern SF has finally settled on some truly timeless notions. Nothing written today will ever seem dated. ↩︎
- Yes, yes: spacemen from an exploded fourth planet is another explanation but not the correct one. ↩︎
- And in one case, undesirable. ↩︎
- Seriously? “Podkayne” isn’t already in my Word dictionary? ↩︎
- I can say this for Varley: there doesn’t seem to be much overlap in his contemporaneous collections. Varley wasn’t the sort of author to make readers buy the same story twice. ↩︎
Varley’s short work is what I love. I’ve about worn out the John Varley Reader.
Do you have career retrospectives ready for all the older generation of writers? If not, this was an impressive turnaround.
I do not.
I only have two speeds: hyperactive squirrel or coma. If I can get the hamster wheel in my brain to move at all, it moves very quickly. This is dependent on factors such as “is this a subject about which I am obsessed?”, “how much coffee have I had?”, and “Am I double-fisting Modafinil?”
(For a long time I thought I was unusually patient at work. Then on my first day on Modafinil, I looked at the suggestion of one to four tablets per day, decided a median dose would be safe and took two. Turns out there’s a difference between patient and too tired to protest. FWIW, the correct amount to take would have been one half tablet)
“Overdrawn at the Memory Bank”, source of the anteater-hating MST episode? The mind boggles.
And I had no idea that “Millenium” was based on a Varley work. I was planning on seeing that with friends and then something happened and they saw it without me and then hated it so much that I never saw it. I bet they are still mad about that movie.
My mind boggles that RSL Films took a well-liked Varley short, cast Raul freaking Julia and then somehow made a complete dog’s breakfast out of the project. Was there ever a good adaption of a Varley?
I can’t really say but IMDB says there were only three others, on TV (and it has remarkably obfuscated interface to find out which episodes): one in American Playhouse – Overdrawn at the Memory Bank (1984, with Raul Julia again; what could possibly go wrong? rating 2.4 out of 10 and mentions of MST3K) and two in Welcome to Paradox: Options (1998, 6.9 but just 15 votes?!) and “Blue Champagne Resort” (next week, 5.9).
I, too, was much impressed with Varley in various phases of his writing, and my reading, career; even this August in Seattle, when I chanced upon a magical secondhand bookshop, I bought… I think it was Slow Apocalypse; I should finally open it tonight, if I can find it.
I was also reminded of your assessment of Varley’s career arc in your review of The Persistence of Vision. But that was of course before Irontown Blues, which everyone seems to agree is as good as the first two.
Goodbye, sweet prince…
I loved Varley’s work — started with the collection The Persistence of Vision which had a cover probably designed to appeal to pre-teen boys (although actually I started with “Overdrawn at the Memory Bank” in Galaxy, but didn’t realize at the time it was the same author.) I’m sad to hear of his passing.
My father exclusively read scifi and had a large book collection that started in the late 1960s. Every once in a while in my teen years, he would look at me, deduce I was bored, and hand me a particular book from his collection. One of those selected books was Titan, and I devoured it and then the next two books of the trilogy. It was definitely one of his strangest selections (lesbian sex! the complexities of centaur reproduction!), but I enjoyed them and it was good to have my reading horizons broadened with something I wouldn’t have picked up on my own (I was always welcome to read from his collection, but I rarely picked anything on my own as it was overwhelming and hard to know where to dive in).
I re-read them a decade or so ago, and they’ve held up fairly well, though I concur with the issues noted above for modern readers.
To expand on “there doesn’t seem to be much overlap in his contemporaneous collections”: some authors… Laumer, say…it wasn’t unusual to discover that any three collections of his had two anthologies worth of material between them. Varley’s The Persistence of Vision (1978), The Barbie Murders (1980), and Blue Champagne (1986) were not like that, and neither are Good-Bye, Robinson Crusoe and Other Stories, and The John Varley Reader.
As I recall, Crusoe and Reader have all but… seven? Varley shorts:
Scoreboard (1974)
A Choice of Enemies (1975)
Manikins (1976)
The M&M Seen as a Low-Yield Thermonuclear Device (1976)
Her Girl Friday (1992)
Truth, Justice and the Politically Correct Socialist Path (1995)
A Christmas Story (2003)
(unless His Girl Friday does not count as it became part of Steel Beach)
One more try at posting this
The M&M Seen as a Low-Yield Thermonuclear Device and The Manhattan Phone Book are stories that live in my brain. I also read all his novels up to Red Thunder (and a few of the later ones)
I did the research on anthology overlap just the other day, trying to determine if it was worthwhile to replace my three old Varley collections with the two newer collections.
The two 21st century collections contain all but one of the stories collected in the three 20th century collections (Manikins being the exception).
The Varley Reader also contains a handful of stories not in any of the three 20th century collections (mostly stories newer than Blue Champaign).
Good-bye Robinson Crusoe contains nothing that is not in the three 20th century collections.
There is exactly one story that appears in two of the 20th century collections, but I didn’t note what it was.
Then I learned the prices for used copies of Good-bye Robinson Crusoe and had to re-think my plans.
Just a thought on that topic, a new reprint of a story may be edited differently from previous versions. Ideally to improve the work, not to spoil it, and also I think I remember that Isaac Asimov’s collections, as possibly an outlying example, were printed first time the way that he wanted, reversing edits made in magazine publication of his works. And unless it’s a selling point, which is doubtful, you don’t particularly get paid for revising old stories for republication. Still, a new print of a story might be different from its precvous text, and you might not like any such changes.
Tragically, my proposals for the Massive Reprint Anthologies Because James Wants to Reread These Short Works And My Mass Market Paperbacks Wore Out series have gone unanswered by top publishers, mainly because I never actually sent them.
I found the Ted Dikty anthologies useful for that.
I had not heard Varley died. He lived a good long life, but I am still extremely sad, because his work was absolutely a major influence on me! I read his works as they came out, being a youngster myself at the time. Bought and read them as fast as they came out, in fact.
The gender-shifting, body-modding, world-within-a-world stories, the Titan trilogy, the time-travel-paradox of Mammoth… these shaped my thinking in so many ways, from being entirely unbothered by the whole subject of gender fluidity, to contemplating what “identity” means when you can be cloned over and over …and/or be bonded to a symb! Oh, the list goes on and on.
RIP, old man, and thank you for your stories.
Having recently passed three-score-and-twelve, I’d disagree about 78 being a particularly long life, no matter how good it may have been.
I enjoyed all of stories and books that I did read, but I never read anything past Red Thunder in the Thunder & Lightning sequence as I was particularly of that class of stories
What word should go between “particularly” and “of”?
it should read “not particularly fond”.
Smartphone typing is not a skill I’ve mastered.
I have to admit, I’d forgotten I’d ever read Titan, but once I started reviewing the plot, I remembered how much I hated it. Why do 60s and 70s authors believe that sexual assault makes women Complete People? And it’s not just the male authors, either.
I understand why he’s a beloved author, but reading the Big Authors as a young black girl, well, let’s just say that when I was a teenager I decided to only read female authors for a number of years.
If it’s not too late, I can give you a list of women SFF authors whose approach to consent is such that you’ll want to avoid them… but not in this thread.
The Persistence of Vision is one of the greatest science fiction short story collections ever. If you only read novels, this is a collection worth making an exception for. It has more ideas in it than many series.
The Gaean Trilogy was wildly creative, but bitter and sour. I admired it and laughed at some of the scenes, but I can’t say that I liked it.
I was pleasantly surprised by The Golden Globe. It doesn’t have a message. It’s just a character-driven story with a fascinating character, and it never slows down.
Varley, like Heinlein, is an author whose early short work is far less annoying than his later longer work.
I bought Steel Beach and Golden Globe in hardcover. After reading them, I decided that I just wasn’t in love with them like I was with the short stories set in the same universe, and they ended up being sold during a book cull. I learned this week that Irontown Blues exists, and decided against buying it.
Earlier this century, I bought Red Thunder and Mammoth in paperback. I decided I was not interested in checking out the later installments of the Red Thunder series. I have yet to encounter a Heinlein-inspired juvenile novel that I liked.
Mammoth deeply annoyed me, because it was a 21st century novel all about extinction and environmentalism which completely ignored human induced climate change. When I read the premise of Slow Apocalypse, I decided to avoid it at all costs.
I still have all of Varley’s work prior to Steel Beach, although it’s been at least a decade since I last read any of it.
Early Varley was pretty seminal for teenage me, “The Persistence of Vision” and “Press Enter []” especially (not least for their dramatically different impacts.)
The novel ‘Millenium’ was based on his short story ‘Air Raid’, which came in second place for the 1978 Hugos, and third for Locus Awards. It has the kernel of the premise in ‘Millenium’ but is MUCH better, fast and hard-edged. It may have been the first time travel story that speculated that if you snatched people from history who were doomed to die anyhow, you wouldn’t upset the timeline. Later authors used this premise, including Kaliane Bradley in last year’s ‘The Ministry of Time’.
Read Varley’s short work! It’s his best stuff.
Varley was a classic idea writer, and short stories are the best medium for that. “Air Raid” would have made a good Twilight Zone episode.
How to suddenly feel very, very old.
I recall reading Varley’s first published SF story, “Picnic on Nearside”, in the August 1974 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which I’donly just started buying regularly. I was mightily impressed, and was eager to read more of his fiction. Fortunately for me, a flood of superior short works followed, and eventually novels. For a while there he really did seem the hottest thing in SF.
Somewhere along the way, though, my interest dimmed. I recall not particularly loving “Steel Beach” – at least not as much as I had the earlier Eight Worlds stories – and I don’t think I read anything he published after that.
One story that stands out in my memory though is “The Manhattan Phonebook (Abridged)”. Even in the nuclear-conscious 1980s it was particularly memorable – and chilling.
And now Varley is gone, aged 78, which by modern standards really isn’t that old. I was saddened to learn that he’d been in poor health in recent years. It’s reminded that nerdy 1974 reader that he’s now a fair bit older himself, and it’s probably time to reread some of those stories that so impressed him – and some of the author’s later work as well. Better late than never, I suppose.
I remember owning and reading “Superheroes” back in the day, but remember essentially nothing of it now. I think it irritated me at the time — I felt the stories had a general attitude of “Ho ho, aren’t superheroes juvenile and dumb, let’s make fun of them! Stupid nerds!” But I also suspect I’m probably fairly wrong about that assessment — I was a comic book fan in the era before superheroes took over mass media, so I was probably over-sensitive to anyone smack-talking my hobby…
The Gaean books were a memorable milestone for me as a young reader of that era because they were a departure from the division between ‘hard’ and ‘new wave’, and instead seemed to me to have some of the better qualities of each. Gaea is extremely memorable for me. The first scene with the traveling filmmaking menagerie just delighted me.
The things I remember most after reading SFF all these years are the books which did something new in the genres that I’d not seen or thought of before.