VarleyLog
Things to Do in Isolation
We have cabin fever so bad that some days we just get in the car and drive around. I suppose we shouldn’t, but we don’t come in contact with anybody, so what’s the harm? The traffic is negligible to non-existent. Gas prices are rock bottom. We paid $1.87/gallon yesterday, and Oregon has just about the most expensive gas in the country.
Driving around, it struck me that many people ...
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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
Ed Wood
Tim Burton is an uneven director, in my opinion. I’ve liked about half of his movies, the other half, not so much. This is one of the good ones. It’s a surprisingly affectionate portrait of possibly the worst director ever to shout “Action” who ever worked in Hollywood. (My personal favorite bad director is the great Doris Wishman, who helmed Nude on the Moon and ...
More details »Latest Collection
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 ...
More details »Featured Short Fiction
The Manhattan Phone Book (Abridged)
If every picture tells a story, every person could tell even more…
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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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