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 ...
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
Judy
Strangely enough, I have only seen one of the other Oscar-nominated performances for this year: Scarlett Johansson in Marriage Story. It’s possible that Cynthia Erivo, Saoirse Ronan, or Charlize Theron were better than Renée Zellweger … but I strongly doubt it. This is one of those uncanny performances where the actress channels the part so strongly that she ...
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
Options
It is said that to understand someone, you need to see the world through another’s eyes. What understanding would come through another’s sex?
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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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