Profile of John Varley on Famous Like Me

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

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").

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

"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)

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.

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.

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:

• Titan
• Wizard
• Demon

Bibliography

Novels

• The Ophiuchi Hotline (1977)
• Titan (1979)
• Wizard (1980)
• Millennium (1983)
• Demon (1984)
• Steel Beach (1992)
• The Golden Globe (1998)
• Red Thunder (2003)
• Mammoth (2005)

Short story collections

• The Persistence of Vision (1978)
• The Barbie Murders (1980) (republished as Picnic on Nearside, 1984)
• Blue Champagne (1986)
• The John Varley Reader (2004)

Other

• Millennium - screenplay (1989) based on the short story "Air Raid" (as was the novel Millennium)

Awards

Varley has won the Hugo Award three times:

• 1979 - Novella – "The Persistence of Vision"
• 1982 - Short Story – "The Pusher"
• 1985 - Novella – "Press Enterâ– "

and has been nominated a further twelve times.

He has won the Nebula Award twice:

• 1979 - Novella – "The Persistence of Vision"
• 1985 - Novella - "Press Enterâ– "

and has been nominated a further six times.

He has won the Locus Award ten times:

• 1976 - Special Locus Award – four novelettes in Top 10 ("Bagatelle", "Gotta Sing, Gotta Dance", "Overdrawn at the Memory Bank", "The Phantom of Kansas")
• 1979 - Novella – "The Persistence of Vision"
• 1979 - Novelette – "The Barbie Murders"
• 1979 - Single Author Collection – The Persistence of Vision
• 1980 - SF Novel – Titan
• 1981 - Single Author Collection – The Barbie Murders
• 1982 - Novella – "Blue Champagne"
• 1982 - Short Story – "The Pusher"
• 1985 - Novella - "Press Enterâ– "
• 1987 - Collection – Blue Champagne

Varley has also won the Jupiter Award, the Prix Apollo, several Seiun Awards and others.

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