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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

Westercon

Sometime in June Charles Brown, the editor of Locus, wrote to inform me that The John Varley Reader had won the Locus Award 2005 Best Collection. (It was a close thing, I didn’t get the most 1st place votes, but with the system he uses I ended up winning with overall votes. I’m pretty proud of it, considering ...

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Novels

The Golden Globe

All the universe is a stage, and Sparky Valentine is its itinerant thespian–and a wanted man. His galactic roamings are bringing him closer to home, closer to justice–and closer to the truth of his strange and prolonged existence.

– Ingram

There’s a lot of humor … plenty of theatrical ...

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Movie Reviews

The Dirty Dozen

There is a select handful of World War II movies that never show a battle and still manage to be really great. There are based-on-fact ones like The Great Escape, and there are made-up ones like Operation Crossbow, The Guns of Navarone, and The Eagle Has Landed. They operate like heist movies, which I love, ...

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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

Gotta Sing, Gotta Dance

Music and motion — it takes two to tango. Or does it take 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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