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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

Hillside Cemetery

It’s been a while since we went on a celebrity body hunt, so when other business called us down to the lower reaches of Culver City, we decided to visit this graveyard, which is rich in famous bones. It’s also a Jewish cemetery, like Mount Sinai, which always affords a few surprises. Several times in our quest we will look at each other and say “I didn’t know he/she was ...

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Novels

Rolling Thunder

Lieutenant Patricia Kelly Elizabeth Podkayne Strickland-Garcia-Redmond – otherwise known as Podkayne – is third-generation Martian with a planet-sized chip on her shoulder. Her grandfather Manny was one of the first men to set foot on Mars. So Poddy has some equally planet-sized shoes to fill…

That’s why she’s joined the Music, Arts, and Drama Division ...

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Movie Reviews

Mephisto

Klaus Maria Brandauer delivers an acting tour de force in this movie which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. He portrays an actor, Hendrik Höfgen, who is just bursting with energy, and wants to move up in the world but is stuck in regional theater. He moves to Berlin from the provinces and soon begins to be noticed. The role he is most famous for is Mephistopheles from the ...

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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

The Manhattan Phone Book (Abridged)

If every picture tells a story, every person could tell even more…

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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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