John Varley

:For the English watercolour painter and astrologer, see John Varley (painter).

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John Herbert Varley (born 1947) is a science fiction author. He has written several novels and numerous short stories, many of them in a future history (the Eight Worlds) where years before a race of mysterious and omnipotent aliens kicked humans off the Earth, but humans have inhabited virtually every other corner of the solar system, often through the use of wild biological modifications partially learned from eavesdropping on alien communications. His detailed speculations on the ways humans might use advances in biological science were revelatory in the 1970s when his story collection The Persistence of Vision was released. The title story in that collection won the Hugo and Nebula awards, and it has been suggested that "Overdrawn at the Memory Bank" may have inspired some portions of the movie Total Recall (although the primary inspiration was clearly the credited source, the Philip K. Dick story "We Can Remember it for you Wholesale").

Related Topics:
1947 - Science fiction author - Future history - Hugo - Nebula - Total Recall - Philip K. Dick

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Varley spent some years in Hollywood but the only tangible result of this stint was the film Millennium. Of his Millennium experience Varley said:

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:"We had the first meeting on Millennium in 1979. I ended up writing it six times. There were four different directors, and each time a new director came in I went over the whole thing with him and rewrote it. Each new director had his own ideas, and sometimes you'd gain something from that, but each time something's always lost in the process, so that by the time it went in front of the cameras, a lot of the vision was lost." (Interview in St. Louis Post-Dispatch Monday, July 20, 1992)

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Varley is often compared to Robert Heinlein. In addition to a similarly descriptive writing style, similarities include free societies and free love. Two of his connected novels, Steel Beach and The Golden Globe, posit a sub-society of Heinleiners. The Golden Globe also contains a society evolved from a prison colony on Pluto and a second society evolved from it on Pluto's moon, Charon--a situation most notably found in Heinlein's The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. Unlike Heinlein's lunar society, Varley's convict society is a cross between the mafia and the yakuza, only more so. This can be construed as a critique of Heinlein's novel and the ideas within it.

Related Topics:
Robert Heinlein - Steel Beach - The Golden Globe - Pluto - Charon - The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress

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Varley is noteworthy for the frequent prominence of female characters, unusual in science fiction, and especially so among male authors of hard science fiction. This prominence is visible not only in his Eight Worlds history where sex changes are routine, but in his other works as well. The idea of routine sex changes is also an example of the sexual themes that color his works without dominating them.

Related Topics:
Hard science fiction - Sexual themes

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John Varley has also written a trilogy of novels set in a hollow world reminiscent in structure to a very large Stanford torus space habitat, but with a distinctly different personality. They are:

Related Topics:
Stanford torus - Space habitat

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• Titan
• Wizard
• Demon
 
John Varley: Bibliography ►