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 ...
More details »Looking Back
The Shrub That Ate a House
The sleepy little town of Sierra Madre is off the beaten trail, wedged as it is between Arcadia, Monrovia, and Pasadena, at the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. But not so very long ago it was at the center of a struggle for the very survival of humanity. I detailed this story a while back in my review of the four movie versions of Jack Finney’s book The Body ...
More details »Novels
Red Lightning
“The heart-pounding space race is on,” exclaimed Publishers Weekly about Red Thunder, while The Washington Post called it “realistic – and funny.” Now, award-winning author John Varley continues the adventure with a novel featuring a new generation of spacefaring heroes…
“Mars sucks.” And if anyone’s allowed to say it, Ray ...
More details »Movie Reviews
The Trouble With Harry
Hitchcock said on several occasions that this was his favorite of his films. I think he mentioned others at other times, but this one is clearly from the heart. A very black, very strange heart, but still. Audiences in 1955 weren’t ready for this sort of black humor, and the film was a financial bust. I just dearly love it, and have since the first time I saw it. In a forest near a tiny ...
More details »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 ...
More details »Short Fiction
The Manhattan Phone Book (Abridged)
If every picture tells a story, every person could tell even more…
More details »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.
More details »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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