VarleyLog
COVID-19
You do everything right, and still things go wrong. We are both double vaccinated and we’ve been masking up and social distancing since the pandemic began. Then last week after having lunch at a restaurant here in Vancouver where the vaccination rate is 54 percent we both started feeling very bad. Almost too weak to walk. I’ve been coughing horribly. Lee not so much, but neither of ...
More details »Latest Novel
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
Titanic
There have been many films, both fictional and documentary, about the first and final voyage of the White Star liner, the “unsinkable” Titanic, but only three of them can really be classified as epic. This was the first, starring Clifton Webb, Barbara Stanwyck, and a very young Robert Wagner. Five years later there was A Night to ...
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
Sending Prayers to the Cosmos
March 4, 2021
John was discharged from the hospital February 28 with many instructions, one being that has to sit in the backseat. Since our PT Cruiser’s backseat hardly accommodates 6’ 5” John under the best of circumstances, his wonderful family came to the rescue yet again. (Kerry, Francine and Jerry gathered together and delivered all the things he needed at home.) We picked him ...
More details »Featured Short Fiction
Retrograde Summer
In the varied landscapes of Mercury, the truths about family might be more fluid than mercury.
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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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