VarleyLog
Mount St. Helens and Castle Rock Trip Report
On May 17th, 1980, I landed in Seattle on a 747 flight from London. My trip had begun that day in Paris, where I had spent two days following a convention in Metz, France. Now I transferred to a little 18-seater for the final leg, to Eugene.
We hadn’t been in the air long until the pilot told us that we were flying almost over Mount St. Helens, which had been in the news a lot ...
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Irontown Blues
A new noir science fiction novel from a master of science fiction set in the Eight Worlds series about a detective on the hunt for biohackers who have created a dangerous new disease.
Christopher Bach was a policeman in one of the largest Lunar cities when the A.I. Lunar Central Computer had a breakdown, known as the Big Glitch, but it turned out to be a larger war than ...
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Latest Movie Review
Yesterday
This one immediately goes on my list of Best Films of 2019, and it might even be the very best of those I’ve seen so far. The premise is fairly simple. Jack Malik, an unsuccessful wannabe rock writer and performer, is hit by a bus. When he comes to, he soon discovers that he is in an alternate reality where the Beatles never existed. Mention John, Paul, George, and Ringo, and you get a ...
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Good-Bye, Robinson Crusoe and Other Stories
“This stellar collection by John Varley contains eleven provocative, utterly distinctive stories and novellas. None of them are currently available in any other book. Some have been unavailable in any form for twenty-five years or more. The result is a publishing event that no admirer of Varley—or of first-rate imaginative fiction—can afford to miss.
“The ...
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News
An Experiment
I really hate the big New York publishing houses. I started off here with two pages going into all the reasons I hate them, listing all the ways they screw authors these days. Then I read it and decided that I was sounding like a whiny little bitch, so I tossed all that. Suffice it to say that, what with the mergers where big companies became even bigger and other factors, everything that ...
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Featured Film
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
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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