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
Part 2: The Loneliest Place in America
We stayed one night at the Diamond D motel in Delta, Utah. Small as it was, it was the largest town for maybe a hundred miles. It had wide, wide streets. In most of the years since 1776, when some Spanish friars became the first white men ever to visit what the maps call the Sevier Desert, the land hadn’t been worth much, so why be stingy when surveying for streets? We had to cross the ...
More details »Novels
Red Thunder
The US space program is effectively over. The loss of the Ares Seven ship was the final blow. Everyone has accepted that the manned Chinese ship, Heavenly Harmony, being prepped for a mission to Mars, will be the first vessel from Earth to land on the Red Planet.
In a deserted warehouse near Daytona, a band of seven suburban misfits – including a Cajun boy genius and a ...
More details »Movie Reviews
Taking Woodstock
A little over 40 years ago 50 million people gathered in a cow pasture about 90 miles northwest of New York City for the Woodstock Music and Art Fair. Or at least that’s how it seems, when you consider all the people who claim to have been there. I was one of the 500,000 who actually was there, for the whole thing. There has been a lot of discussion about Woodstock during the 40th ...
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
Blue Champagne
No matter the technological wonders that come to pass, it is still a story of human needs and desires that effervesce.
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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