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Blue Champagne
A collection of science fiction stories from "the best writer in America" (Tom Clancy)—Hugo and Nebula award-winning author John Varley.
John Varley's unique blend of startling technology and genuinely human characters has won him every major science fiction award several times over for both his novels and his short fiction.
Blue Champagne collects eight thought-provoking stories from one of the genre's undisputed masters, including the Hugo Award-winner "The Pusher," and the Hugo and Nebula award-winner "Press Enter."
John Varley's unique blend of startling technology and genuinely human characters has won him every major science fiction award several times over for both his novels and his short fiction.
Blue Champagne collects eight thought-provoking stories from one of the genre's undisputed masters, including the Hugo Award-winner "The Pusher," and the Hugo and Nebula award-winner "Press Enter."
290 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1986
37 people are currently reading
501 people want to read
About the author
John Varley
234 books606 followersFull name: John Herbert Varley.
John Varley was born in Austin, Texas. He grew up in Fort Worth, Texas, moved to Port Arthur in 1957, and graduated from Nederland High School. He went to Michigan State University.
He has written several novels and numerous short stories.He has received both the Hugo and Nebula awards.
John Varley was born in Austin, Texas. He grew up in Fort Worth, Texas, moved to Port Arthur in 1957, and graduated from Nederland High School. He went to Michigan State University.
He has written several novels and numerous short stories.He has received both the Hugo and Nebula awards.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 59 reviews
March 27, 2020
Reread of one of Varley's key collections (are any of them non-key?). Note overlap with "The John Varley Reader," TOC http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?6...
● The Pusher • (1981) • short story. 4.5 stars. Starship crewman devises a unique stratagem to maintain contact with his homeworld after relativistic time distortion: story-telling! 4.5 stars. Won the Hugo & Locus awards.
● Blue Champagne • [Anna-Louise Bach] • (1981) • novella. Swimming with a superstar! on an orbital resort. Much better story than I recalled: 4.5 stars. Introduces both Anna Louise Bach (later a lunar cop) and Megan Galloway, the superstar. Galloway develops into a surprisingly sympathetic character, here & in the following story.
● Tango Charlie and Foxtrot Romeo • [Anna-Louise Bach] • (1986) • novella. Young girl and her doggies, trapped on a doomed space station. Tugs the heart-strings, it does. 4+ stars
● Options • [Eight Worlds] • (1979) • novelette. Cleo decides on her first sex-change! 3.5 stars?
● Lollipop and the Tar Baby • [Eight Worlds] • (1977) • novelette. 5 stars, one of the strongest of the 8 Worlds stories. A young clone of a hole-hunter finds out that black holes can talk. This one bears some very unpleasant news.
● The Manhattan Phone Book (Abridged) • (1984) • short story. 2-star (or less), a sad (in both senses) after-the-nukes story. Original here, and no wonder.
● The Unprocessed Word • (1986) • short story. Eh.
● Press Enter ▮ • (1984) • novella. Won the Hugo, Nebula and other awards. One of his most famous stories. A rogue computer starts murdering people. The technology hasn't aged well, but it's still a compelling story. Lisa the Vietnamese-American hacker! Victor Apfel, the damaged Korean war vet. 3.5 stars
In the late 1970s and early 80s, John Varley wrote a series of stories (and one short novel, his first) on the Eight Worlds, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight_W... , which will likely be his enduring literary legacy. He's better at writing short fiction than novels. There are places where his vision has dated a bit (computer and video tapes are still ubiquitous) but you will barely notice.
Jo Walton's thoughts are always worth reading: https://www.tor.com/2010/03/12/john-v...
● The Pusher • (1981) • short story. 4.5 stars. Starship crewman devises a unique stratagem to maintain contact with his homeworld after relativistic time distortion: story-telling! 4.5 stars. Won the Hugo & Locus awards.
● Blue Champagne • [Anna-Louise Bach] • (1981) • novella. Swimming with a superstar! on an orbital resort. Much better story than I recalled: 4.5 stars. Introduces both Anna Louise Bach (later a lunar cop) and Megan Galloway, the superstar. Galloway develops into a surprisingly sympathetic character, here & in the following story.
● Tango Charlie and Foxtrot Romeo • [Anna-Louise Bach] • (1986) • novella. Young girl and her doggies, trapped on a doomed space station. Tugs the heart-strings, it does. 4+ stars
● Options • [Eight Worlds] • (1979) • novelette. Cleo decides on her first sex-change! 3.5 stars?
● Lollipop and the Tar Baby • [Eight Worlds] • (1977) • novelette. 5 stars, one of the strongest of the 8 Worlds stories. A young clone of a hole-hunter finds out that black holes can talk. This one bears some very unpleasant news.
● The Manhattan Phone Book (Abridged) • (1984) • short story. 2-star (or less), a sad (in both senses) after-the-nukes story. Original here, and no wonder.
● The Unprocessed Word • (1986) • short story. Eh.
● Press Enter ▮ • (1984) • novella. Won the Hugo, Nebula and other awards. One of his most famous stories. A rogue computer starts murdering people. The technology hasn't aged well, but it's still a compelling story. Lisa the Vietnamese-American hacker! Victor Apfel, the damaged Korean war vet. 3.5 stars
In the late 1970s and early 80s, John Varley wrote a series of stories (and one short novel, his first) on the Eight Worlds, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight_W... , which will likely be his enduring literary legacy. He's better at writing short fiction than novels. There are places where his vision has dated a bit (computer and video tapes are still ubiquitous) but you will barely notice.
Jo Walton's thoughts are always worth reading: https://www.tor.com/2010/03/12/john-v...
January 14, 2026
Check out my full, spoiler free, video review HERE.
My first experience reading Varley, and it was great. My favorites were the longer novella length stories. He packs a surprising amount of character development as well as providing some excellent science fiction backdrops. There were a couple stories in this collection that were sort of joke stories and they were just ok but all the rest were above average.
My favorites were:
• Lollipop and the Tar Baby
• Tango Charlie and Foxtrot Romeo
• Press Enter
• Blue Champagne
My first experience reading Varley, and it was great. My favorites were the longer novella length stories. He packs a surprising amount of character development as well as providing some excellent science fiction backdrops. There were a couple stories in this collection that were sort of joke stories and they were just ok but all the rest were above average.
My favorites were:
• Lollipop and the Tar Baby
• Tango Charlie and Foxtrot Romeo
• Press Enter
• Blue Champagne
June 12, 2018
Bach stood at parade rest across the desk from her seated superior and cultivated a detached gaze. I'm only awaiting orders, she told herself. I have no opinions of my own. I'm brimming with information, as any good recruit should be, but I will offer it only when asked, and then I will pour it forth until asked to stop.
That was the theory, anyway. Bach was not good at it. It was her ineptitude at humoring incompetence in superiors that had landed her in this assignment, and put her in contention for the title of oldest living recruit/apprentice in the New Dresden Police Department.
I felt rather short-changed because one of the stories, "Lollipop and the Tar Baby" was also included in his previous collection, "The Barbie Murders" which I read last month and which was originally published 6 years before "Blue Champagne". Apart from that one, the only other story I had read before is the first, "The Pusher". My favourites were "Charlie Tango and Romeo Foxtrot" and "Press Enter" both of which were quite sad stories, and come to think of it, the book as a whole had a sad and poignant tone.
Two of the stories featured Anna-Louise Bach, but they are earlier in her life than in "Bagatelle" and "The Barbie Murders", before she became the police chief of New Dresden on Luna. The Anna-Louise Bach stories and some of the others are set much earlier than the Eight Worlds novels, although according to Wikipedia these pre-invasion stories are not actually part of the Eight Worlds chronology at all, which I hadn't realised. In these stories, Earth has not yet been taken over by the gas-giant beings, and the technology for quick and easy (and reversible) sex-changes and downloading the backed up mind and memories of the dead into newly cloned bodies have not yet been developed so death is still final, and you can’t just get a new body grown for you if you are paralysed in a hang-gliding accident.
Overall, the stories in this collection are sad and poignant, with the only laughs coming from "The Unprocessed Word". This is the satirical tale of an author named John Varley's attempts to engage his editor, publisher and readers in his increasingly crazed struggle against the rise of the word processor.
That was the theory, anyway. Bach was not good at it. It was her ineptitude at humoring incompetence in superiors that had landed her in this assignment, and put her in contention for the title of oldest living recruit/apprentice in the New Dresden Police Department.
I felt rather short-changed because one of the stories, "Lollipop and the Tar Baby" was also included in his previous collection, "The Barbie Murders" which I read last month and which was originally published 6 years before "Blue Champagne". Apart from that one, the only other story I had read before is the first, "The Pusher". My favourites were "Charlie Tango and Romeo Foxtrot" and "Press Enter" both of which were quite sad stories, and come to think of it, the book as a whole had a sad and poignant tone.
Two of the stories featured Anna-Louise Bach, but they are earlier in her life than in "Bagatelle" and "The Barbie Murders", before she became the police chief of New Dresden on Luna. The Anna-Louise Bach stories and some of the others are set much earlier than the Eight Worlds novels, although according to Wikipedia these pre-invasion stories are not actually part of the Eight Worlds chronology at all, which I hadn't realised. In these stories, Earth has not yet been taken over by the gas-giant beings, and the technology for quick and easy (and reversible) sex-changes and downloading the backed up mind and memories of the dead into newly cloned bodies have not yet been developed so death is still final, and you can’t just get a new body grown for you if you are paralysed in a hang-gliding accident.
Overall, the stories in this collection are sad and poignant, with the only laughs coming from "The Unprocessed Word". This is the satirical tale of an author named John Varley's attempts to engage his editor, publisher and readers in his increasingly crazed struggle against the rise of the word processor.
January 19, 2025
My first exposure to John Varley was a poor novel of his from the 2000s (titled *Mammoth*, if you must know), but after reading some of his 70s/80s short fiction in anthologies since then, I was willing to give some of his short fiction a shot; that's why I picked up two of his collections (this and *In the Hall of the Martian Kings*, better known as *The Persistence of Vision* (7.5/10 to me)) at a used bookshop for my birthday in 2023. That other collection (which was his first) pleasantly surprised me, and showed that he could be both an inventive and engaging writer. But the stories in *Blue Champagne* take those elements to a new level and explore interhuman relationships, transhumanism, artificial intelligence, and more all stitched together by a very strong sense of not just storytelling, but science fictional storytelling. This is one of the collections of the year, and while I'm a little weary of just how high I'm rating it, I do think that this has some awesome examples of what 80s SF short fiction has to offer.
--The collection starts with "The Pusher," which starts with a creep on the playground and ends in with . The reveal of just what a "pusher" is was wonderfully doled out in drips, just like SF reveals should be, and there was a sense of paradigm shifting at the end of the short, Hugo-winning tale, even if I find it slightly doubtful that . Like a lot of this book, the writing style is good and smart and engaging but leaves a little unidentifiable something to be desired - I shan't worry about that too much, and while I was tempted to give this an 8.25/10, I think that the science fictional crafting and misdirectional use of the subject matter deserves an 8.5/10. What can I say; I'm a sucker for relativity.
--If "The Pusher" was the warm up, "Blue Champagne" - Locus Award-winning titular story - is the meat & potatoes. It starts on the Bubble, a tourist attraction comprised of water meant to be swam through in zero-G (both the Bubble and the thrilling-seeking, cultish outlook of it reminds me of the cavern in Heinlein's "The Menace From Earth," which makes sense as Heinlein was a clear influence on Varley). The main character is Q. M. Cooper, one of the Bubble's lifeguards. He starts out the story in a relationship with fellow lifeguard Anna-Louise Bach (that name might ring a bell), but then a woman from Earth comes up and gets in the way of their relationship (another aspect this story and "The Menace From Earth" share). This woman happens to be Megan Galloway, a solar-system wide film star thanks to the recordings of not just her sights but what she feels at different points in time. Her career's on the downswing, but she hasn't resorted to intrusive pornos yet, and when she starts spending time with this conclusion is poignant and emotional and as much as this story is about science fictional tourism or sensory recordings or the struggles of being a massively popular celebrity, it's about Q.M.'s and Galloway's relationship. How well their development is tied into the new technology is really admirable, and you couldn't have this story without the SF elements; not to mention that between the pacing and the worldbuilding, this is just an incredibly well structured story. Another 8.5/10.
-I'll try and speed things up while talking about "Tango Charlie and Foxtrot Romeo" (original to this collection), which shouldn't actually be too hard because I read this novella as part of a Tor Double last year. It's about a space station orbiting the Moon which has been quarantined because of an inexplicable virus that tore through it years ago, and what happens when the lunar officials discover signs of life - specifically, of a young girl - currently living on that station. The catch? The station is going to crash into the Moon in a matter of days, and the girl - along with the dogs she's been breeding for decades - will die. I remembered everything to do with the little girl well, but I forgot how much of the story is focused on Anna-Louise Bach (the same as in "Blue Champagne," who is one of the cops in charge of the whole ordeal, and then how Megan Galloway inserts herself into the picture in order to save the little girl. All the female characters have interesting relations to each other, and while this story isn't too inventive, I find the twisting ending and the concepts tossed around about how powerful people react to crisis situations to be noble. This just makes the 8/10 cut, even though it seems to be one of the stories that's better in the moment than weeks, months, or years on, especially when looking at how Bach and Galloway influence each other and how they've been influenced by Q.M....
--I read "Options" in Wollheim's Best SF of 1980 volume, and I found it to be mostly like I remembered it. Like the first time I read it, I was dissatisfied with the ending (but this time because it feels like there was a lack of emotional buildup to it, and not because it lacks addressing how the protagonist's children would react to their mother having herself swapped into a male clone of herself because she was tired of feeling... like a woman? I mean, she admits there's nothing wrong with how she feels), but this is probably also a time to say: Varley was kind of a pervert, and there's a lot of sex and what some people would call debauchery happening in all of these stories, not just this one. I don't particularly enjoy every single character being promiscuous - it seems needlessly decadent to me - but, it's out there, and you should be warned if you're going to pursue his work. "Options" remains an 8/10, and you can read more on my thoughts about it here (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...).
--"Lollipop and the Tar Baby" is probably my favorite short story in this collection. It takes all of Varley's architectural abilities and wraps them into a story about a teenage girl who hunts black holes in the outskirts of the solar system alongside her mother, who's really just a clone of herself. Their relationship is tough - the younger self has a complex about her mother being, well, her, and they do some rather improper things together - but the relationship gets tougher when the young clone finds a black hole only to have it talk back to her and make her question . It's one helluva clever black hole, and the end is a really good climax to the interpersonal relationships, system law, space physics, and more. Just... so well structured, and with enough interesting pieces to make the mind chew on this mental cud for quite a while. 8.5/10.
--"The Manhattan Phone Book (Abridged)" is this quirky little flash fiction anti-nuclear war story told in the second person as if you were reading through the phone book. It seeks to influence your views on nuclear war through telling stories of how people in the phone book die after the Holocaust. It's a cute idea, but ultimately didn't move me all that much. I'm not knocking it, because I like things that are different, but still... 7/10.
--"The Unprocessed Word" was, in my opinion, a much cooler experiment. It's a series of letters between John Varley and Susan, his editor (I don't know if she was in real life). The story begins with Varley sending letters about how the publishers should advertise his books specifically as VarleyYarns with the guarantee they were written on a typewriter and not with a word processor (like Microsoft Word). The idea is hesitantly accepted and flops, so Varley goes on tirades about some popular and successful authors (they're funny) before . It's quirky and satirical and I got a kick out of it. 7.75/10.
--Finally, we have "Press Enter," the winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards for best Novella in 1985 (and the Seiun award for novellas translated into Chinese a couple years later). It's about a Korean War veteran who lives next-door to an enigmatic man whom he receives a phone call from one day. He reports to the man's house only to find a dead body, with a computer requesting that someone "Press Enter" sitting near the corpse. Some people want to rule it a suicide, but the strange computing devices around warrant that a Caltech computer expert named Lisa Foo should soon take up residence in the enigmatic neighbor's house while investigating his equipment. She enters a romantic engagement with the veteran and they soon swap traumas, from his ... while the characters are not the big strength of the story for me, these two characters are pulled off pretty well, and how they interact with the big thing that I can't say outside spoiler tags is interesting and is giving us food to thought even now, with the rise of certain technologies. But Varley is able to beef up what might have become trite paranoia with his character's own traumas and whatnot, and while the sheer imagery and science fictional flexibility of the story doesn't touch the three crowning jewels from this collections, it's stately and majestic and has crept into my mind more often than I would've expected. It is quite good, and still gets an 8.25/10 out of me.
While some critics and reviewers put Varley's first collection atop *Blue Champagne*, I thoroughly disagree. The stories collected there felt kind of unfinished and murky, and while the stories here probably aren't much more inventive or dangerous or innovative, Varley's storytelling craft has massively improved by now, and I think that counts for just as much as anything. I suddenly really appreciate his storytelling craft, and stories like "Blue Champagne" or even "Press Enter" are still coming to my mind. I think this will be the one short story collection of the year to get an 8.5/10 - it kind of scrapes by, but it gets there, and I'm glad I read this. I have to read the intermediate collection *The Barbie Murders* now, and I'll be sure to finally give some of his *real* novels a go when I have a chance. Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for more adventures into transhumanism, commercial consciousness, swashbuckling in space, and whatever other SF you desire...
--The collection starts with "The Pusher," which starts with a creep on the playground and ends in with . The reveal of just what a "pusher" is was wonderfully doled out in drips, just like SF reveals should be, and there was a sense of paradigm shifting at the end of the short, Hugo-winning tale, even if I find it slightly doubtful that . Like a lot of this book, the writing style is good and smart and engaging but leaves a little unidentifiable something to be desired - I shan't worry about that too much, and while I was tempted to give this an 8.25/10, I think that the science fictional crafting and misdirectional use of the subject matter deserves an 8.5/10. What can I say; I'm a sucker for relativity.
--If "The Pusher" was the warm up, "Blue Champagne" - Locus Award-winning titular story - is the meat & potatoes. It starts on the Bubble, a tourist attraction comprised of water meant to be swam through in zero-G (both the Bubble and the thrilling-seeking, cultish outlook of it reminds me of the cavern in Heinlein's "The Menace From Earth," which makes sense as Heinlein was a clear influence on Varley). The main character is Q. M. Cooper, one of the Bubble's lifeguards. He starts out the story in a relationship with fellow lifeguard Anna-Louise Bach (that name might ring a bell), but then a woman from Earth comes up and gets in the way of their relationship (another aspect this story and "The Menace From Earth" share). This woman happens to be Megan Galloway, a solar-system wide film star thanks to the recordings of not just her sights but what she feels at different points in time. Her career's on the downswing, but she hasn't resorted to intrusive pornos yet, and when she starts spending time with this conclusion is poignant and emotional and as much as this story is about science fictional tourism or sensory recordings or the struggles of being a massively popular celebrity, it's about Q.M.'s and Galloway's relationship. How well their development is tied into the new technology is really admirable, and you couldn't have this story without the SF elements; not to mention that between the pacing and the worldbuilding, this is just an incredibly well structured story. Another 8.5/10.
-I'll try and speed things up while talking about "Tango Charlie and Foxtrot Romeo" (original to this collection), which shouldn't actually be too hard because I read this novella as part of a Tor Double last year. It's about a space station orbiting the Moon which has been quarantined because of an inexplicable virus that tore through it years ago, and what happens when the lunar officials discover signs of life - specifically, of a young girl - currently living on that station. The catch? The station is going to crash into the Moon in a matter of days, and the girl - along with the dogs she's been breeding for decades - will die. I remembered everything to do with the little girl well, but I forgot how much of the story is focused on Anna-Louise Bach (the same as in "Blue Champagne," who is one of the cops in charge of the whole ordeal, and then how Megan Galloway inserts herself into the picture in order to save the little girl. All the female characters have interesting relations to each other, and while this story isn't too inventive, I find the twisting ending and the concepts tossed around about how powerful people react to crisis situations to be noble. This just makes the 8/10 cut, even though it seems to be one of the stories that's better in the moment than weeks, months, or years on, especially when looking at how Bach and Galloway influence each other and how they've been influenced by Q.M....
--I read "Options" in Wollheim's Best SF of 1980 volume, and I found it to be mostly like I remembered it. Like the first time I read it, I was dissatisfied with the ending (but this time because it feels like there was a lack of emotional buildup to it, and not because it lacks addressing how the protagonist's children would react to their mother having herself swapped into a male clone of herself because she was tired of feeling... like a woman? I mean, she admits there's nothing wrong with how she feels), but this is probably also a time to say: Varley was kind of a pervert, and there's a lot of sex and what some people would call debauchery happening in all of these stories, not just this one. I don't particularly enjoy every single character being promiscuous - it seems needlessly decadent to me - but, it's out there, and you should be warned if you're going to pursue his work. "Options" remains an 8/10, and you can read more on my thoughts about it here (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...).
--"Lollipop and the Tar Baby" is probably my favorite short story in this collection. It takes all of Varley's architectural abilities and wraps them into a story about a teenage girl who hunts black holes in the outskirts of the solar system alongside her mother, who's really just a clone of herself. Their relationship is tough - the younger self has a complex about her mother being, well, her, and they do some rather improper things together - but the relationship gets tougher when the young clone finds a black hole only to have it talk back to her and make her question . It's one helluva clever black hole, and the end is a really good climax to the interpersonal relationships, system law, space physics, and more. Just... so well structured, and with enough interesting pieces to make the mind chew on this mental cud for quite a while. 8.5/10.
--"The Manhattan Phone Book (Abridged)" is this quirky little flash fiction anti-nuclear war story told in the second person as if you were reading through the phone book. It seeks to influence your views on nuclear war through telling stories of how people in the phone book die after the Holocaust. It's a cute idea, but ultimately didn't move me all that much. I'm not knocking it, because I like things that are different, but still... 7/10.
--"The Unprocessed Word" was, in my opinion, a much cooler experiment. It's a series of letters between John Varley and Susan, his editor (I don't know if she was in real life). The story begins with Varley sending letters about how the publishers should advertise his books specifically as VarleyYarns with the guarantee they were written on a typewriter and not with a word processor (like Microsoft Word). The idea is hesitantly accepted and flops, so Varley goes on tirades about some popular and successful authors (they're funny) before . It's quirky and satirical and I got a kick out of it. 7.75/10.
--Finally, we have "Press Enter," the winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards for best Novella in 1985 (and the Seiun award for novellas translated into Chinese a couple years later). It's about a Korean War veteran who lives next-door to an enigmatic man whom he receives a phone call from one day. He reports to the man's house only to find a dead body, with a computer requesting that someone "Press Enter" sitting near the corpse. Some people want to rule it a suicide, but the strange computing devices around warrant that a Caltech computer expert named Lisa Foo should soon take up residence in the enigmatic neighbor's house while investigating his equipment. She enters a romantic engagement with the veteran and they soon swap traumas, from his ... while the characters are not the big strength of the story for me, these two characters are pulled off pretty well, and how they interact with the big thing that I can't say outside spoiler tags is interesting and is giving us food to thought even now, with the rise of certain technologies. But Varley is able to beef up what might have become trite paranoia with his character's own traumas and whatnot, and while the sheer imagery and science fictional flexibility of the story doesn't touch the three crowning jewels from this collections, it's stately and majestic and has crept into my mind more often than I would've expected. It is quite good, and still gets an 8.25/10 out of me.
While some critics and reviewers put Varley's first collection atop *Blue Champagne*, I thoroughly disagree. The stories collected there felt kind of unfinished and murky, and while the stories here probably aren't much more inventive or dangerous or innovative, Varley's storytelling craft has massively improved by now, and I think that counts for just as much as anything. I suddenly really appreciate his storytelling craft, and stories like "Blue Champagne" or even "Press Enter" are still coming to my mind. I think this will be the one short story collection of the year to get an 8.5/10 - it kind of scrapes by, but it gets there, and I'm glad I read this. I have to read the intermediate collection *The Barbie Murders* now, and I'll be sure to finally give some of his *real* novels a go when I have a chance. Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for more adventures into transhumanism, commercial consciousness, swashbuckling in space, and whatever other SF you desire...
April 2, 2022
I read this for a book club, and I really did not enjoy it. Varley shows a lot of talent, but he inserts unnecessary, disturbing shit into each of the stories. I am told he was more of a troll than a creep, but the distinction did not make a difference for me as a reader.
"The Pusher"
Apparently, Varley intentionally made this story seem like it was about a pedophile to disturb people. It worked. 0/5
"Blue Champagne"
I have mixed feelings about this story. It has lots of weird sex stuff and jumps in logic. It has a lot of cranky Luddite social commentary. I am not sure how comfortable I am with its depiction of disability. It also has a strong core relationship and interesting science fictional concepts. 3/5
"Tango Charlie and Foxtrot Romeo"
This story is a sequel to Blue Champagne. I hated it at first, but it grew into something more. I do not think Varley is funny, and I dislike Anna-Louise's weird and unjustified judgmental attitude. Megan Galloway is good, though. 3/5
"Options"
Nope. I am not going to read a story about a child going to school naked. 0/5
"Lollipop and the Tar Baby"
This may be the best story in the collection. It is a tight, domestic thriller about an adolescent clone and her "mother" searching deep space for black holes. 4/5
"The Manhattan Phone Book (Abridged)"
This is a surprising anti-nuclear short that uses a phone book to make its point. No creepy sex stuff! 4/5
"The Unprocessed Word"
I sincerely hope this Luddite did not put his author through any of this anti-computer nonsense. 1/5
"Press Enter"
This would be an interesting if reflexively anti-tech story about the power of computers and the potential for emergent AI, if not for the racism. 2.5/5
"The Pusher"
Apparently, Varley intentionally made this story seem like it was about a pedophile to disturb people. It worked. 0/5
"Blue Champagne"
I have mixed feelings about this story. It has lots of weird sex stuff and jumps in logic. It has a lot of cranky Luddite social commentary. I am not sure how comfortable I am with its depiction of disability. It also has a strong core relationship and interesting science fictional concepts. 3/5
"Tango Charlie and Foxtrot Romeo"
This story is a sequel to Blue Champagne. I hated it at first, but it grew into something more. I do not think Varley is funny, and I dislike Anna-Louise's weird and unjustified judgmental attitude. Megan Galloway is good, though. 3/5
"Options"
Nope. I am not going to read a story about a child going to school naked. 0/5
"Lollipop and the Tar Baby"
This may be the best story in the collection. It is a tight, domestic thriller about an adolescent clone and her "mother" searching deep space for black holes. 4/5
"The Manhattan Phone Book (Abridged)"
This is a surprising anti-nuclear short that uses a phone book to make its point. No creepy sex stuff! 4/5
"The Unprocessed Word"
I sincerely hope this Luddite did not put his author through any of this anti-computer nonsense. 1/5
"Press Enter"
This would be an interesting if reflexively anti-tech story about the power of computers and the potential for emergent AI, if not for the racism. 2.5/5
November 4, 2025
Buenos relatos, entre ellos destaco 'El Pusher' corto, controversial y efectivo, 'Blue Champagne' con su ambiente romántico, 'Opciones' que la verdad no me gusto por que la sexualidad en si como temática se me hace un poco densa a veces, y por ultimo el mejor relato a mi parecer 'Pulse Enter 0' que me dejo pensando y me hizo sentir una especie de sensación a horror informático.
No leí 'Tango Charlie y Foxtrot Romeo', intente iniciarlo varias veces pero me mareaba, quizás sea algo de la traducción.
No leí 'Tango Charlie y Foxtrot Romeo', intente iniciarlo varias veces pero me mareaba, quizás sea algo de la traducción.
November 5, 2018
Raccolta di tre racconti.
L'unico veramente bello è il secondo, in cui c'è un ottimo bilanciamento tra suspense, personaggi credibili e buoni dialoghi.
Il primo racconto ha una trama talmente esile che ho faticato a capire come ha fatto l'autore ad allungare il brodo così tanto: onore a lui, per essersi spinto oltre le dieci pagine.
Il terzo è un pastrocchio sui timori dell'uomo nei confronti dell'intelligenza artificiale, diluito da una inutile quanto improbabile storia d'amore.
Nel complesso, appena sopra la sufficienza.
L'unico veramente bello è il secondo, in cui c'è un ottimo bilanciamento tra suspense, personaggi credibili e buoni dialoghi.
Il primo racconto ha una trama talmente esile che ho faticato a capire come ha fatto l'autore ad allungare il brodo così tanto: onore a lui, per essersi spinto oltre le dieci pagine.
Il terzo è un pastrocchio sui timori dell'uomo nei confronti dell'intelligenza artificiale, diluito da una inutile quanto improbabile storia d'amore.
Nel complesso, appena sopra la sufficienza.
October 9, 2009
It surprises me that I haven't encountered more Varley before now. I read Steel Beach years ago, and I'd read one of the stories in this anthology ("Press Enter") previously, but never sought anything else out.
This book was a good further introduction. Several of the stories tie into the same history, which also includes some of Varley's novels; others are standalones. The title story, in the first category, is probably my favorite all told. "Press Enter", in the latter category, is also pretty striking; I don't know that the ending quite lives up to it, but some of its thunder may have been stolen by my having read it before. "The Manhattan Phone Book (Abridged)" and "The Unprocessed Word" aren't exactly standard works of fiction-- I'd say the former is a lot more successful than the latter, or at least ages better.
I think Varley really nails the balance that makes good SF work. The settings, physical and social, are interesting, detailed, and well thought out, and what they support are strong, character-driven stories. He has some interesting angles on gender. And he has a knack for the occasional visceral detail without being lurid for luridness's sake.
I spent something like $4 on five paperbacks at a book fair a couple of weeks ago, and this is the second five-star review from among them. So far, so good.
This book was a good further introduction. Several of the stories tie into the same history, which also includes some of Varley's novels; others are standalones. The title story, in the first category, is probably my favorite all told. "Press Enter", in the latter category, is also pretty striking; I don't know that the ending quite lives up to it, but some of its thunder may have been stolen by my having read it before. "The Manhattan Phone Book (Abridged)" and "The Unprocessed Word" aren't exactly standard works of fiction-- I'd say the former is a lot more successful than the latter, or at least ages better.
I think Varley really nails the balance that makes good SF work. The settings, physical and social, are interesting, detailed, and well thought out, and what they support are strong, character-driven stories. He has some interesting angles on gender. And he has a knack for the occasional visceral detail without being lurid for luridness's sake.
I spent something like $4 on five paperbacks at a book fair a couple of weeks ago, and this is the second five-star review from among them. So far, so good.
July 23, 2018
I'm glad I picked this book up from the huge pile of procrastinated readings.
How could I been such a fool and left it a couple of decades gathering dust and cobwebs in a forgotten corner of the classic science fiction section of me library? The small tome feels old, because of that and because I bought it used, very used, in an acceptable condition. But I digress.
The genius of John Varley, more than three and a half decades ago I was overwhelmed by a Spanish translation of "The Persistence of Vision" a collection of short stories and a novella that were way ahead of those times, and still are.
Blue Champagne does not fall short of the aforementioned collection's greatness, and the pace gathers up relentlessly from "The Pusher" which is a lovely story about space time travel duration, next comes some space opera in the title story sharing a couple of characters with the following "Tango Charlie and Foxtrot Romeo" and its shelties pups. "Options" is still relevant as the gender issues are. The book next goes back to space with "Lollipop and the Tar baby" with the morality of self cloning and succession. Immediately Varley treats us with dark humour (more humour than dark actually) in "The Manhattan Phone book (Abridged) and "The Unprocessed Word" with its computer triggered paranoia which reaches its climax with the final -and the best- story of this collection "Press Enter ▓" that includes the loveliest hacker ever.
Grab your copy today.
How could I been such a fool and left it a couple of decades gathering dust and cobwebs in a forgotten corner of the classic science fiction section of me library? The small tome feels old, because of that and because I bought it used, very used, in an acceptable condition. But I digress.
The genius of John Varley, more than three and a half decades ago I was overwhelmed by a Spanish translation of "The Persistence of Vision" a collection of short stories and a novella that were way ahead of those times, and still are.
Blue Champagne does not fall short of the aforementioned collection's greatness, and the pace gathers up relentlessly from "The Pusher" which is a lovely story about space time travel duration, next comes some space opera in the title story sharing a couple of characters with the following "Tango Charlie and Foxtrot Romeo" and its shelties pups. "Options" is still relevant as the gender issues are. The book next goes back to space with "Lollipop and the Tar baby" with the morality of self cloning and succession. Immediately Varley treats us with dark humour (more humour than dark actually) in "The Manhattan Phone book (Abridged) and "The Unprocessed Word" with its computer triggered paranoia which reaches its climax with the final -and the best- story of this collection "Press Enter ▓" that includes the loveliest hacker ever.
Grab your copy today.
July 4, 2019
Even before I picked this collection up I was convinced that Varley will be remembered more as a short-fiction artist than as a master of the longer forms (I may change my mind on that; of his output since this collection was first published I have only read _Steel Beach_, which I remember liking, but plan on continuing through is work as I usually do with authors I enjoy). His third collection up this point in his career, this book is very impressive and his overall best collection of stories (_Persistence of Vision_ is almost as good; _Picnic on Nearside_ is his weakest for reasons I will get to in a moment). Although this book was put together like his other collections (that is, with no discernible reasoning behind what is included and what is left out: this book contains fiction published between 1977 and 1985, overlapping material in his earlier collections and including one story, "Lollipop and the Tar Baby" that was included in the second edition of his second collection), the jumble of stories works together to create an impressive result. There is not a single bad story in the lot, and even his (almost certainly) John Barth-inspired experiments in metafiction ("The Manhattan Phone Book (Abridged)" and the hilarious "The Unprocessed Word") are skillfully wrought and very entertaining. Almost half of the collection is taken up by two stories from his Anna-Louise Bach series of future police tales (most of the rest are included in _Picnic on nearside_), though A-LB only appears as an incidental character in "Blue Champagne" ("Tango Charlie and Romeo Foxtrot" is the other story). "Blue Champagne" is an impressive novella and tackles a wide range of issues from materials technology to a characteristic Varleyan interest in human disabilities to a critique of the influence of mass media on society. The opening story, "The Pusher," wreaks havoc with the reader's expectations to great (but still creepy) effect. And sex/gender roles are addressed in "Options," which is possibly the beginning of a theme that extends into Varley's next major work _Steel Beach_.
I want to address the final (and most famous) story as a separate part of this review. "Press Enter" (if I recall correctly) won both the Hugo and Nebula awards in 1985 or so, and is unlike any of Varley's other short works: it's set in the present day (1983), it features a male as the narrator and primary viewpoint character, and it is (in some ways, and explicitly self-nominated as such) reactionary in its attitude toward the potential effects of technological development. In many ways this tale is closer to William Gibson's contemporary (and also award-winning) _Neuromancer_ than to anything Varley had written up to that date. (I don't want to spoil a good read for you, so I won't even begin to address specifically what the story is about in case you have not read it before; just be aware that it is a classic in the genre and, in some ways, hasn't really aged well.) What I want to address is the academic controversy this story created in some circles. In my academic field, Donna Haraway is a significant and important scholar. For several years (and influenced by one of her graduate students, Katie King), Haraway championed the work of Varley in her particular brand of feminist/science and technology studies scholarship, particularly efforts such as "The Persistence of Vision" and the _Gaea_ trilogy (though see my reviews of those books for my take on them; not Varley's best work imo). However, she found this story a disappointment, specifically because of how one character, Lisa Foo, is treated within the (first person) text and what her ultimate fate is in the plot. She accused Varley of being misogynist based on certain elements of the story. Even as I was first reading Haraway's work in the mid-1990s (and about 10 years after I first read "Press Enter") this critique didn't strike me as entirely valid. What I think there _is_ in this story that is somewhat disturbing is a definite orientalist (in Edward Said's version of that term) cast to how Lisa is treated in the story (and many other "Oriental" characters, as Varley always refers to them). In fact, Varley's persistence in seeing human relations in terms almost solely of "race" several decades after the work of many anthropologists and geneticists have demonstrated that there is no such thing in the terms we commonly use for it, is one of the major weaknesses of Varley's fiction (though one I am usually willing to set aside as a product of both ignorance and the time in which Varley was educated and wrote his earlier works). It has a more insidious and distrubing effect in this story, however, and that is in part because of who the narrator is and what makes him a damaged character: his capture by the North Koreans during the Korean War and his endurance of torture and psychological pressure ("brainwashing") in their POW camps. However, I believe the presence of the Orientalism in this particular story (in only in this one) is due _mainly_ to who the narrator is and how he has been trained by his socialization to see the world. Similarly, this character's same interest in Lisa Foo as a sexualized person, and his particular focus on her large (and "fake" breasts) is also a necessary result of who the narrator is. In other words, I think Haraway is guilty of believing that Varley shared the misogyny of his central character, which is _not_ a valid (or particularly reasonable) assumption to make, given the evidence of virtually _all_ of Varley's other work. In fact, the way Lisa's breasts are explicitly discussed between the two characters in the story points more to a critique of how sexualised American society was at that time _and_ how closely linked that sexualization was with America's militarism during the 1950s and 1960s. The fact that Varley has to resort ot Orientalist tropes to make this critique is an unfortunate consequence of the fact that, like any other writer, Varley is a product of his place and time. Haraway _should_ have been just a little bit more clever in her critque and she could have made a better job of it.
Ultimately, I believe that this book, along with Varley's other collections, form an essential part of any well-stocked science fiction library. This is very good work indeed.
I want to address the final (and most famous) story as a separate part of this review. "Press Enter" (if I recall correctly) won both the Hugo and Nebula awards in 1985 or so, and is unlike any of Varley's other short works: it's set in the present day (1983), it features a male as the narrator and primary viewpoint character, and it is (in some ways, and explicitly self-nominated as such) reactionary in its attitude toward the potential effects of technological development. In many ways this tale is closer to William Gibson's contemporary (and also award-winning) _Neuromancer_ than to anything Varley had written up to that date. (I don't want to spoil a good read for you, so I won't even begin to address specifically what the story is about in case you have not read it before; just be aware that it is a classic in the genre and, in some ways, hasn't really aged well.) What I want to address is the academic controversy this story created in some circles. In my academic field, Donna Haraway is a significant and important scholar. For several years (and influenced by one of her graduate students, Katie King), Haraway championed the work of Varley in her particular brand of feminist/science and technology studies scholarship, particularly efforts such as "The Persistence of Vision" and the _Gaea_ trilogy (though see my reviews of those books for my take on them; not Varley's best work imo). However, she found this story a disappointment, specifically because of how one character, Lisa Foo, is treated within the (first person) text and what her ultimate fate is in the plot. She accused Varley of being misogynist based on certain elements of the story. Even as I was first reading Haraway's work in the mid-1990s (and about 10 years after I first read "Press Enter") this critique didn't strike me as entirely valid. What I think there _is_ in this story that is somewhat disturbing is a definite orientalist (in Edward Said's version of that term) cast to how Lisa is treated in the story (and many other "Oriental" characters, as Varley always refers to them). In fact, Varley's persistence in seeing human relations in terms almost solely of "race" several decades after the work of many anthropologists and geneticists have demonstrated that there is no such thing in the terms we commonly use for it, is one of the major weaknesses of Varley's fiction (though one I am usually willing to set aside as a product of both ignorance and the time in which Varley was educated and wrote his earlier works). It has a more insidious and distrubing effect in this story, however, and that is in part because of who the narrator is and what makes him a damaged character: his capture by the North Koreans during the Korean War and his endurance of torture and psychological pressure ("brainwashing") in their POW camps. However, I believe the presence of the Orientalism in this particular story (in only in this one) is due _mainly_ to who the narrator is and how he has been trained by his socialization to see the world. Similarly, this character's same interest in Lisa Foo as a sexualized person, and his particular focus on her large (and "fake" breasts) is also a necessary result of who the narrator is. In other words, I think Haraway is guilty of believing that Varley shared the misogyny of his central character, which is _not_ a valid (or particularly reasonable) assumption to make, given the evidence of virtually _all_ of Varley's other work. In fact, the way Lisa's breasts are explicitly discussed between the two characters in the story points more to a critique of how sexualised American society was at that time _and_ how closely linked that sexualization was with America's militarism during the 1950s and 1960s. The fact that Varley has to resort ot Orientalist tropes to make this critique is an unfortunate consequence of the fact that, like any other writer, Varley is a product of his place and time. Haraway _should_ have been just a little bit more clever in her critque and she could have made a better job of it.
Ultimately, I believe that this book, along with Varley's other collections, form an essential part of any well-stocked science fiction library. This is very good work indeed.
March 8, 2017
I love this book. I've read it about four times previously. I keep it on my book shelf and pick it up again every few years. For me Varley's work captures an ideal blend of entertaining story telling wrapped around big ideas. It's a toss up for me which I like better, this book or The Persistence of Vision. Both are classics for me. This guy has such solid world creation skills that there is never an instant that I have to deliberately accept "willful suspension of disbelief". I simply get drawn in and accept the universes he creates, hook, line and sinker. Any short story collection is going to have favorites and also rans. My favorites may not be your favorites. But for anyone who has even a passing interest in science fiction, Varley's work is not to be missed.
November 3, 2018
A collection of John Varley stories I had not yet encountered! How could I resist? How could I not enjoy it immensely!
So I did not and I did.
A collection of stories from his early years having been collected during his early years. I'm actually glad I've run across it now instead of back then as I think I've enjoyed it more.
This review is really just a recommendation. Tho' I must say, the final story in the collection has eerie echoes of today's digital world of privacy problems.
So I did not and I did.
A collection of stories from his early years having been collected during his early years. I'm actually glad I've run across it now instead of back then as I think I've enjoyed it more.
This review is really just a recommendation. Tho' I must say, the final story in the collection has eerie echoes of today's digital world of privacy problems.
October 14, 2018
Típico libro que lees un buen comentario por la red, ves que en goodreads tiene buena crítica y decides abordarlo. Por desgracia, no me ha llegado a enganchar de la manera que se presuponía....
Varley nos trae una serie de mini historias conclusivas donde se nos expone varios temas como el amor, la clonación, el cambio de sexo o la dilatación del tiempo. En total cuenta con 8 relatos, algunos más acertados que otros, pero salvo uno llamado "Pulse Enter" (precisamente es el que menos tiene de sci fi) el resto no me han conseguido seducir mucho.....y precisamente no es por la temática o las historias, que son amenas y personajes bien construidos, es precisamente por la manera de escribir del autor, el cual no he llegado a conectar y disfrutar de sus relatos.
Además de "Pulse Enter", son dignos de mención "Opciones" (Aborda el cambio de sexo y las repercusiones que tiene en el seno de la familia), "Blue Champagne" (como se banalizan los sentimientos humanos para venderlos a los medios de comunicación, amor y traición son la base) y "El Pusher" (un relato demasiado corto centrado en la dilatación del tiempo).
Hay otra parte positiva y es que el conjunto de relatos no supera las 400 páginas. Creo que hay mejores libros en este género tan espectacular como amplio.
Varley nos trae una serie de mini historias conclusivas donde se nos expone varios temas como el amor, la clonación, el cambio de sexo o la dilatación del tiempo. En total cuenta con 8 relatos, algunos más acertados que otros, pero salvo uno llamado "Pulse Enter" (precisamente es el que menos tiene de sci fi) el resto no me han conseguido seducir mucho.....y precisamente no es por la temática o las historias, que son amenas y personajes bien construidos, es precisamente por la manera de escribir del autor, el cual no he llegado a conectar y disfrutar de sus relatos.
Además de "Pulse Enter", son dignos de mención "Opciones" (Aborda el cambio de sexo y las repercusiones que tiene en el seno de la familia), "Blue Champagne" (como se banalizan los sentimientos humanos para venderlos a los medios de comunicación, amor y traición son la base) y "El Pusher" (un relato demasiado corto centrado en la dilatación del tiempo).
Hay otra parte positiva y es que el conjunto de relatos no supera las 400 páginas. Creo que hay mejores libros en este género tan espectacular como amplio.
September 11, 2021
An outstanding collection of SF short stories but don't take my word for it, several of these stories have won multiple Hugo, Nebula or Locus awards.
The setting for about half of the stories is Varley's "Eight Worlds" and these stories fit fairly early in that future history. However, all stand alone and can be read without any knowledge of the rest. These stories have a hard SF / space opera background with some unique invention. Despite this the stories are very much about people and their interactions, love and loss, ambition and regret. These are for the most part beautifully realised and tug at the heart strings.
There are a couple of oddities. Manhattan Phone Book is an OK after the bomb moral, Unprocessed Word is excellent comedy that will appeal to anyone who has ever had problems with a word processor.
The final story Press Enter is one of the multiple award winners. Again it is a story about people, in this case two survivors clinging to each other, set in a chilling tale of paranoia. But is it still paranoia when they really are out to get you? By turns touching, scary and sad it is a deserving winner.
All in all an outstanding collection of work from one of the great SF authors of our time. Highly recommended.
The setting for about half of the stories is Varley's "Eight Worlds" and these stories fit fairly early in that future history. However, all stand alone and can be read without any knowledge of the rest. These stories have a hard SF / space opera background with some unique invention. Despite this the stories are very much about people and their interactions, love and loss, ambition and regret. These are for the most part beautifully realised and tug at the heart strings.
There are a couple of oddities. Manhattan Phone Book is an OK after the bomb moral, Unprocessed Word is excellent comedy that will appeal to anyone who has ever had problems with a word processor.
The final story Press Enter is one of the multiple award winners. Again it is a story about people, in this case two survivors clinging to each other, set in a chilling tale of paranoia. But is it still paranoia when they really are out to get you? By turns touching, scary and sad it is a deserving winner.
All in all an outstanding collection of work from one of the great SF authors of our time. Highly recommended.
January 14, 2026
A blogger I follow on tumblr made a post about John Varley, who I never heard of before, when he recently passed away.
She mentions that he's the author of the short story the movie in my all time favorite Mystery Science Theater episode Overdrawn At The Memory Bank was based on. Something about that movie, I assumed it was Raul Julia and the fake plants... I've always loved it. Never occurred to me that there might be a writer under there. So I hit the library and got two results that I had to wait two weeks for. This is the first one I read. You never know what you're going to get when picking up an author like this. And I did almost faint away, cringe and crawl out of my human skin at the (multiple award winning) first story in this collection. But. I pushed forward through that and was rewarded. I won't ever forget any of these stories. It's not often you can get out to where space is really flat and I appreciate it.
She mentions that he's the author of the short story the movie in my all time favorite Mystery Science Theater episode Overdrawn At The Memory Bank was based on. Something about that movie, I assumed it was Raul Julia and the fake plants... I've always loved it. Never occurred to me that there might be a writer under there. So I hit the library and got two results that I had to wait two weeks for. This is the first one I read. You never know what you're going to get when picking up an author like this. And I did almost faint away, cringe and crawl out of my human skin at the (multiple award winning) first story in this collection. But. I pushed forward through that and was rewarded. I won't ever forget any of these stories. It's not often you can get out to where space is really flat and I appreciate it.
January 10, 2020
This is more of a 4.5 than a 4.
A most excellent book and one that I did not want to put down. He makes very interesting characteres. Oh and one story has Shelties!
A few of the stories tie together with other stories from his Eight Worlds books and characters within. I will be reading more of him.
At the end of the book I realized that I had read "Press Enter[]" before back in highschool
Varley manages to make characters believable and interesting even when they are doing mundane things.
(And I love his vision for colonizing the solar system. I wish it would happen minus a certain event which I won't mention because it is a spoiler).
A most excellent book and one that I did not want to put down. He makes very interesting characteres. Oh and one story has Shelties!
A few of the stories tie together with other stories from his Eight Worlds books and characters within. I will be reading more of him.
At the end of the book I realized that I had read "Press Enter[]" before back in highschool
Varley manages to make characters believable and interesting even when they are doing mundane things.
(And I love his vision for colonizing the solar system. I wish it would happen minus a certain event which I won't mention because it is a spoiler).
January 30, 2026
My continued tour through the world of John Varley. This volume has some particularly disturbing stories and it's amazing how well they hold up. The last story in "Press Enter". It predicts the rise of AI pretty well. "Options" is an origin story of the 8 worlds beginning to explore gender though changing your biological sex as easily as someone today gets a new tattoo. As in other books Varley doesn't shy away from age of consent and what sexuality would be like if reproduction was completely controlled. Some of those topics still make me uncomfortable.
May 9, 2017
A collection of short stories.
The Pusher 4
Blue Champagne 2
Tango Charlie and Foxtrot Romeo 3
Options 3
Lollipop and the Tar Baby 3
The Manhattan Phone Book 2
The Unprocessed Word 2
Press Enter 4
The Pusher 4
Blue Champagne 2
Tango Charlie and Foxtrot Romeo 3
Options 3
Lollipop and the Tar Baby 3
The Manhattan Phone Book 2
The Unprocessed Word 2
Press Enter 4
January 10, 2018
Not only is the subject matter generally less squicky than "The Persistence of Vision" (except for the first story, sigh), but the stories are generally better (in my opinion). Varley isn't afraid to "go there" on speculation about the future of sex and relationships, and produces some interesting and (IMO) reasonably sophisticated ideas from that. Although I would be very interested to read perspectives on his stories from people who actually are queer, disabled, or what have you.
June 24, 2020
This is a book of short stories, but the first several are so delicately intertwined that I thought I might be reading a novel with a surprisingly good series of character introductions! John Varley doesn't shy away from sex, and he does a good job writing it as a natural part of his characters' lives. I forget how I heard of this book, but I was impressed and will look to see what else Varley has done.
June 2, 2021
It was short stories, so I innately won't love that as a book. But there were some gems in this collection.
It was fascinating how much the short story Blue Champagne predicted celebrity culture, reality tv, and the type of immediate access to celebrity life that we now have. Sadly the talk of economic disparity is exactly the same now as it was 40 years ago.
I was also a little surprised that half the stories went for emotional climaxes. That isn't typically what I get from Varley.
It was fascinating how much the short story Blue Champagne predicted celebrity culture, reality tv, and the type of immediate access to celebrity life that we now have. Sadly the talk of economic disparity is exactly the same now as it was 40 years ago.
I was also a little surprised that half the stories went for emotional climaxes. That isn't typically what I get from Varley.
March 27, 2024
As usual, there’s not many out there who can match the pure imagination and creativity of John Varley. This collection of short stories was fantastic. I especially loved reading about the early days of instant sex changes in his Eight Worlds universe in ‘Options’ and the dark side of the early days of desktop computers in ‘Press Enter.’ Thankfully this collection didn’t contain some of Varley’s more icky stories, though the first one certainly felt a bit questionable.
February 5, 2019
6/10. Media de los 8 libros leídos del autor : 7/10
Un "9" (La Hechicera) un "8" (Perdido en el banco de memoria) y tres "7" (El globo de oro, En el salón de los reyes marcianos y Playa de acero) como destacable por mi parte.
Sin embargo tuvieron bastante éxito otras novelas suyas (Y mañana serán clones, esta misma de Blue Champagne, La persistencia de la vision...) que no me gustaron apenas.
Un "9" (La Hechicera) un "8" (Perdido en el banco de memoria) y tres "7" (El globo de oro, En el salón de los reyes marcianos y Playa de acero) como destacable por mi parte.
Sin embargo tuvieron bastante éxito otras novelas suyas (Y mañana serán clones, esta misma de Blue Champagne, La persistencia de la vision...) que no me gustaron apenas.
September 6, 2019
Absolutely remarkable collection. Very beautiful, thoughtful, and wonderfully experimental with gender. Superb writing of lady characters, too, especially for the era. Extremely memorable - but I need to read it again. It's been a few years, alas.
October 12, 2025
there are a lot of interesting and fun ideas through out the stories in the anthology. varley was clearly ahead of his time in his ideas of sexuality and gender and technologies intervention into human lives. unfortunately his other love was slurs.
Read
November 13, 2025PLACEHOLDER REVIEW
"The Manhattan Phone Book (Abridged)" - A dark comedy masterpiece as John Varley tells you, as he claims, "the best story and the worst story anybody ever wrote"... and it kind of IS, actually. Try not to laugh, or cry, and don't forget to pay your taxes...
"The Manhattan Phone Book (Abridged)" - A dark comedy masterpiece as John Varley tells you, as he claims, "the best story and the worst story anybody ever wrote"... and it kind of IS, actually. Try not to laugh, or cry, and don't forget to pay your taxes...
September 11, 2017
Tiene un par de años que no leía a Varley. Me hacía falta.
July 13, 2018
This was the best book I've read all year.
Read
September 2, 2020I liked it and I'd read it again and continue with the series.
September 2, 2022
This is a series of short stories or novellas. I found the first two quite interesting but the rest not very good from my point of view. Some were really quite silly.
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