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VarleyLog

We Bought a Tesla!

Here’s what happened. Lee came across what looked like a tiny, yellowing IOU at the bottom of some ancient records. It was from the Tooth Fairy, and she said she was a little short of cash and would pay me a dime the next night. It was dated May 8, 1954. I was seven! She’s still in business, you know, the Tooth Fairy, so Lee tracked her down and demanded payment. The old biddy was not ...

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Looking Back

Part 2: The Loneliest Place in America

We stayed one night at the Diamond D motel in Delta, Utah. Small as it was, it was the largest town for maybe a hundred miles. It had wide, wide streets. In most of the years since 1776, when some Spanish friars became the first white men ever to visit what the maps call the Sevier Desert, the land hadn’t been worth much, so why be stingy when surveying for streets? We had to cross the ...

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Novels

Millennium

In the skies over Oakland, California, a DC-10 and a 747 are about to collide. And in the far distant future, a time-travel team is preparing to snatch the passengers, leaving prefabricated smoking bodies behind for the rescue teams to find. And an air disaster investigator gets a phone call that changes his life … and the world as we know it.

This novel was based on John’s ...

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Movie Reviews

Murder on the Orient Express

There can’t have been many better years for Actors in a Leading Role than 1974. The nominees were Albert Finney for this one, Jack Nicholson for Chinatown, Al Pacino for The Godfather, Part II, and Dustin Hoffman for Lenny. Man, what a list! May I have the envelope, please? And the winner is … Art Carney, for ...

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Collections

Picnic on Nearside

Varley’s second story collection, originally published as The Barbie Murders and Other Stories in 1980.

Picnic on Nearside won the 1980 Locus Award for Best Single-Author Collection.

The title story, “Picnic ...

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Short Fiction

Picnic on Nearside

We all change as we grow up, but some changes…

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Titan: An Overview

A Short Overview of Titan

Here's a very short but quite impressive video made by Jean-Paul Verne, a fly-through of Gaea from my trilogy. M. Verne wants to be involved if a movie ever gets made. Over the years many, many people have written to me wishing these books would be made into a movie. Naturally, I'd like that, too. Let's hope this is not as close as we'll ever get.

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Accidental Hippies

Accidental Hippies

Sometime not long after my high school graduation I was studying at Michigan State University when my long-time girlfriend dumped me. I entered such a state of depression that I could not continue in college. So I dropped out and decided to hit the road with Chris Kingsley, my best friend in the world. Chris had much more experience of life on the road than I did, had actually hitched to ...

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