The John Varley Reader

by John Varley

From the moment John Varley burst onto the scene in 1974, his short fiction was like nothing anyone else was writing. His stories won every award the science fiction field had to offer, many times over. His first collection, The Persistence of Vision, published in 1978, was the most important collection of the decade, and changed what fans would come to expect from science fiction.

Now, The John Varley Reader gathers his best stories, many out of print for years. This is the volume no Varley fan - or science fiction reader - can do without.
1 • Picnic on Nearside • [Eight Worlds] • (1974) • novelette by John Varley
24 • Overdrawn at the Memory Bank • [Eight Worlds] • (1976) • novelette by John Varley
53 • In the Hall of the Martian Kings • (1976) • novella by John Varley
91 • Gotta Sing, Gotta Dance • [Eight Worlds] • (1976) • novelette by John Varley
119 • The Barbie Murders • [Anna-Louise Bach] • (1978) • novelette by John Varley
146 • The Phantom of Kansas • [Eight Worlds] • (1976) • novelette by John Varley
180 • Beatnik Bayou • [Eight Worlds] • (1980) • novelette by John Varley
212 • Air Raid • (1977) • shortstory by John Varley
228 • The Persistence of Vision • (1978) • novella by John Varley
271 • Press Enter [] • (1984) • novella by John Varley
327 • The Pusher • (1981) • shortstory by John Varley
343 • Tango Charlie and Foxtrot Romeo • [Eight Worlds] • (1986) • novella by John Varley
409 • Options • [Eight Worlds] • (1979) • novelette by John Varley
437 • Just Another Perfect Day • (1989) • shortstory by John Varley
449 • In Fading Suns and Dying Moons • (2003) • novelette by John Varley
467 • The Flying Dutchman • (1998) • shortstory by John Varley
486 • Good Intentions • (1992) • shortstory by John Varley
502 • The Bellman • [Anna-Louise Bach] • (2003) • novelette by John Varley

Genres: Science Fiction, Short Stories, Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Anthologies, Horror, Fantasy

532 pages, Paperback

First published September 7, 2004

About the author

Full 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.

Reviews

[Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

When it comes to the social side of world-building in Science Fiction, slathered with good science, beautifully messed-up situations, and a really vast setting of our Solar-System nestled neatly in Varley's collective imagination, Varley is a master.

I've read and raved about some authors for their sheer imagination, intense focus on the fringes of technology, and sometimes about the nitty-gritty of what it means to be human, or more specifically, gendered, but Varley takes gender to new heights. Specifically, he follows the same direction as his Eight Worlds novels and makes gender extremely fluid. Anyone can change it whenever they want. Death is also a taboo word because brain recordings are great backups for a force-clone of yourself. Old ideas, right? Well, Varley runs with them in wildly progressive and interesting ways, building vast societies that mess around the niches and the twists. Most of these short stories deal with one version of that or another. And I love it. :)

If I was to recommend any Varley, if only to get a taste as to what he's about and get a great feel for his easygoing and personable writing, it would be this collection.

I've loved most of his novels, too, and I came to this late, but I kinda wish I had started here. It works great as a primer to all the interesting and doubly-interesting stuff to come. :)

Worth it.

Oh! I should mention, Varley's very much a child of the sixties. Expect ruminations on hippies, Woodstock, sexual liberation, and a lot of the great ideals. And he never LOST them. I really appreciate the idealism. :) Love power!

[Jamie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked through some of the more well known pieces here. Not my first experience with Varley, but certainly the deepest. There are some signature themes that seem to recur frequently in his writings, including gender fluidity and a certain uninhibited, and often taboo, eroticism. The stories generally evoke pathos and compassion in a future where advancements extend the human experience beyond our innate limitations, but in doing so also cause something to be lost.

Overdrawn at the Memory Bank (4.0) - channeling Philip K Dick in a sense, an unexpected out of body virtual experience spurs a man to learn and love from the depths of loneliness

Gotta Sing, Gotta Dance (4.0) - symbiotic relationships with alien plant life produces an unexpected source of artistic inspiration

The Phantom of Kansas (4.0) - on Luna a weather artist's clones are being serially murdered

The Pusher (5.0) - a story of the loneliness that only a deep space traveler can fully appreciate, starts out intensely creepy but ends quite poignantly

The Persistence of Vision (3.0) - beautifully written tale of a wanderer who discovers an enigmatic, isolated desert community for the blind and deaf

[Peter Tillman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Has many of his classic shorts, and not much dross. TOC and story info: http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?7...

Varley was one of SF's master storytellers, in his prime. This would be a good place for newcomers to try him out -- it's still in print, I think. At his best he was as good a story-teller as anyone in our genre. I have story-by-story reviews of his first two collections up here, which are the core of his work. Varley's remarkable Eight Worlds future history are his most lasting contribution to SF literature.
The Persistence of Vision: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Blue Champagne: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

The Ophiuchi Hotline, his compact and amazingly good first novel. 4.5 stars, not to be missed!
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
By far his best novel, I think. Varley peaked early!

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gives you more of an overall sense than his novels of the future world Varley envisions. And though I've read a lot of books, there's actually very few author visions that I would like to inhabit, but I would like to live in Varley's vision of the future. Crack open this book and bring along your popcorn for a truly imaginative and visceral ride.

[James Steele · Rating 4 out of 5]

From the introduction to the first story:

It was while living in this flat that I first got the idea that I might try to write and sell science fiction stories. The reason was simple. I needed the money. ... We had been squeaking by for years on nothing much. I think it may have been easier in those days than it is today to exist with no visible means of support. ... In all my meanderings I had never held an actual job for more than a few weeks.

The fact that someone would even consider writing and selling short stories as a good means to earn money makes the United States in the early 1970s more alien to me than any description of extraterrestrial life in any sci-fi story I’ve ever read.

I got [Picnic on Nearside] down to pretty much exactly 10,000 words... and discovered that I had accidentally improved the story tremendously. I sent it back, and a few months later got a check for $200. That was a whole month’s rent, with $25 left over to buy records! I decided this was the life for me.

I normally don’t bother with reading introductions before the stories, but I had to read these because the world these autobiographical intros create is so bizarre and other-wordly. They form a narrative of being a writer in the 1970s, what it was before science fiction was considered respectable.

How after selling a short story to an anthology, suddenly he was “in.” He went to a sci-fi convention and met with the editor who bought the story, met other big-name writers, got a membership with the SFWA, and was subsequently presented with opportunities, including an offer to publish a novel with someone, sight-unseen, no novel in the works, but an offer nonetheless because he was “in.” One short story sale. Just like that.

From there, he was able to make a living writing and selling short stories (originals and reprints) and novels. Pre-internet publishing truly was an alien world, and Varley tells the story frustratingly mundanely, as if all of it was perfectly normal.

Oh, and there are stories here, too. Actual science fiction stories set in the future. Out in space. Places beyond human comprehension.


Picnic on Nearside: Earth has been abandoned, and now humanity lives various places around the solar system, including the moon. Technology has changed humanity so much death is rare and people can change bodies on a whim and fix disease and other defects as one would fix an automobile. It’s a thought-provoking look at just how bizarre this would be from our point of view now. Age wouldn’t mean anything. Gender wouldn’t mean much. Family would lose significance once reproduction had been decoupled from biology. Our protagonist takes a shuttle to the side of the moon that faces Earth, long abandoned, where they find what may be the last person alive who remembers living on Earth. He’s scared of the future and what all this bio-technology was doing to mankind. Was he right to be? This post-earth human species is barely recognizable, what with people changing bodies and genders month to month, going through puberty at age 7 because humankind is no longer limited by natural biology, and apparently clothing is a thing of the past. So how does a relic from an earlier time react to all of this? He refuses to be part of it, so he’s lived in isolation in the abandoned part of the moon colony for some 80 years. For a first published story, this one is decent. Uncomfortable, but that must be how our relic reacted to a changing reality, too. So yeah, thought-provoking and has a way of sticking with you long after you read it. That’s what good fiction should do.


Overdrawn at the Memory Bank: The reason I bought this collection was to read the source material for that episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. My book/movie comparison is perhaps the best summary of this story.

Short review: In the future plugging one’s mind into the body of an animal is a recreational vacation, a welcome break from the tedium of data entry. When Mr. Fingal’s body goes missing while his mind was plugged into a lioness, he must be transferred to the mainframe to keep his mind active and vital. While inside, Fingal is tempted to peer beyond the familiar reality he constructs for himself and try to comprehend the digital reality where he resides, but he resists and instead uses the opportunity to better himself. It’s a quiet story, thoughtful, a far cry from the PBS movie adaptation we love to laugh at. I’d be interested in seeing a more story-faithful version.


In the Hall of the Martian Kings: When a research colony on Mars collapses, the survivors are stranded on the red planet and must plan to survive for years until a rescue can reach them. All seems lost until mysterious, polymer-like plants begin sprouting from the martian surface. That’s the A plot, and it’s intriguing enough to pull the reader forward, but the B plot consists of the interpersonal relations among the five survivors, and these reactions feel... off. The story spends too much time on them and not enough time with the strange flora and fauna that seem to be springing up around the survivors. Everything is explained at the end instead of demonstrated. It’s unsatisfying, but it has some good elements.


Gotta Sing, Gotta Dance: Some human beings choose to live out in space, within the rings of Saturn. They do this by forming a symbiotic bond with an intelligent plant. Together, they keep one another alive and happy. The side effect is that this mingling of two dissimilar minds creates lots of artists, and transcribing their work is good business. The human/symb pairs have little need for money, and they rarely return to areas with gravity, but every ten years or so, a pair returns to Janus to meet with an agent and create a new work of music or prose or poetry or painting. It’s an awkward time for these joined pairs, but it’s the only expression of the life they have in the vacuum of space between the ice boulders of Saturn’s rings. It’s a fascinating concept and presents a good setup for a thoughtful story. This is one of the best in the collection.


The Barbie Murders: Investigating a murder among a community of zealous conformitists. A closed community of some 7,000 people who look the same. Everyone has willingly conditioned themselves, physically and mentally, to think the same, act the same, sound the same, be the same. How does one solve a murder under these circumstances? The imagery alone sells the story; it would make a creepy feature film.


The Phantom of Kansas: A sequel to Picnic on Nearside but further along on the timeline (the story states the protagonist is the reason people live on side of the Earth again, so it’s the same character), Earth has been abandoned. Humanity lives on the various planets in the solar system. There is no outdoors anymore, but the planets have artificial places underground that recreate the outdoors of planet Earth. Weather creation is an art form in this future in which technology has changed mankind so much people make backup copies of their memories every year so they can be restored into a new body when they die. An awful lot of context that is mere setup for a story about identity theft. Our main character is being stalked and murdered. She has been killed 3 times in the previous year, but the authorities are close to finding the killer. It’s just a matter of waiting for him to make the next move. Meanwhile, nothing better to do but compose another storm. Yeah, lots of context needed to make the story work, and it does work. It works very well.


Beatnik Bayou: Another story set on the moon in the same storyverse as Phantom of Kansas and Picnic on Nearside, this is more of in-universe slice of life tale. We get to see what school is like for the young ones: there are no classrooms per se. Instead every child is assigned a tutor as a life coach. Failure to make such arrangements means your kid ends up in public school, which is a bad thing (we don’t learn how or why, and this kinda makes the central conflict confusing). This one isn’t too interesting except for the trial. Apparently when someone files a complaint against another person, the central computer (CC) has final, impartial judgment. This AI knows everyone on first-name basis, creates a unique personality when interacting with them, and yet is impartial in judgment when the law is broken. This computer has access to everyone’s memories of the incident, as well as spoken testimony. If the computer decides you are insane, then you are, and there is no appeal. Its judgments are final and absolute. It’s amazing to read about a time when writers wrote about benevolent AI. Were the 1980s when we were just so optimistic about the future we believed artificial intelligence would be used for the good of mankind and not for keeping us angry so we’ll interact with social media more, or tracking our movements so it can bombard us with advertisements? Looking at how real AI is being used is scary, so it’s refreshing to go back to when things like this were theoretical and we really did believe technology would help society instead of... whatever is happening to us now. We had hope back then.


Air Raid: The introduction to this story steals the show, Varley retelling how closely involved he was in turning it into a feature film named “Millennium,” released in 1989. Earth has been invaded by extraterrestrials, humanity is mostly dead, and snatching people from the past who were about to die anyway to try to save the species is the best solution. The story has a good concept and shows much promise. I��m curious how the film turned out, since Varley himself admits he got caught up in the filmmaking machine and lost sight of the story.

[Update: I watched Millennium, John Varley’s movie. Yeah, I see why he disowned it. The movie focuses so much on the date night between the male and female leads it forgets to tell the story. While it has some impressive sets, it really is a mess, squandering a look at the future in favor of spending a third of the movie on a dinner date.]


The Persistence of Vision: After a prolonged economic depression combined with a nuclear meltdown creates a post-apocalyptic United States, one man lives on the road in search of meaning in his life. He finds a commune of the blind and deaf and tries to understand how they live self-sufficiently. What he learns is they have a very different perception of the environment. So different it may transcend reality. Our main character tries to understand, but is only able to glimpse. At times grotesque but also poignant in how a group of people once dismissed as disabled are the ones able to perceive reality in such a way as to ascend beyond the disaster mankind has created. I enjoyed this. I think it deserves the awards it received. No complaints. I read it years ago and I still remember it. 5 stars.


Press Enter ■: Another story about computers, written during a time when hardly anyone knew anything about them. The jargon is out of date and probably was wrong even at the time, but nobody noticed. A man has been found dead next door, and apparently he had worked on a lot of computer systems all over the world, leaving little back doors in the code for him to access. He vanished himself from society itself and was able to play games with money and infiltrate military systems. Did he really commit suicide, or did he uncover something else about all these newfangled networked computer systems? Could networked computers become a neural net, a new life form, and what would happen when this new intelligence became aware of human beings? Would it tolerate being noticed?

The A plot is fine, but the B plot made me uncomfortable. A 25-year-old women from Korea named Lisa takes up residence to figure out what their deceased man did, the digital web he wove. A woman who, within the text of the story, is described as looking like a stereotypical Asian: “Leaving out only the mustache, she was a dead ringer for a cartoon Tojo. She had the glasses, and the ears, and the teeth.” Um, why? What’s the point of going that far with the description?

Our protagonist, a 50-year-old veteran of the Korean War, gets close to her, and yeah... old man hooking up with a woman half his age. From there, they discuss racism and even play with some of the stereotypes they endured about one another. The discussion from this point of view made me uncomfortable. I don’t know how well this reads today, if it ever read well. To me, it doesn’t really make a difference in the narrative and even borders on race fetishization, though it could be argued they’re both overcoming racial bias in this relationship, and she may look like the stereotype our protagonist grew up with but she doesn’t act like it, so yay subverting audience expectations of the 1980s! I don’t know where it’s coming from or why this makes up the majority of the story. I wasn’t much interested in reading about an old white man describing a young Korean woman’s skin and muscle tone, seemingly obsessed with her “Asian” appearance, and for some reason she is interested in this old white guy. Ok she does have a history to correspond to this, but still... Not my thing. The A plot is interesting but the B plot distracts from it. This story won a Hugo, so it must have done something right.


The Pusher: Another story that’s uncomfortable to read, even as sure as I was that it wasn’t going down the path I thought it was... When a man takes a job on a space ship, a six-month journey equals 25 years on planet Earth. How is he to spend his time off when everyone he knows ages so fast? I’m glad it ended the way it did, but wow this one gets under your skin and messes with expectations.


Tango Charlie and Foxtrot Romeo: A young girl is stranded on an abandoned space station. She is so close, and yet there may be no way to reach her. This one hits hard in the end. Can’t say too much more other than the story’s length is deceptive. Most of it is worldbuilding, and for those of us who have read the collection, much of it is redundant.


Options: In 1979 America was really, really hung up about what the roles of men and women are. In this prequel to Picnic on Nearside, when Changing had just become a reality and was beginning to alter the culture of the Lunar inhabitants, we follow a woman who becomes a man for the first time. We enter a society that is just beginning to accept things don’t have to be so rigid. It’s amazing to read this now, how hung up we must have been on this subject. So many of the subjects this story touches on are no big deal now, such as an open marriage and the idea of gender fluidity, not to mention the idea that the sexes are not separate-but-complimentary, as the Victorians of old lived by.


Just Another Perfect Day: A note to yourself, bringing you up to speed on why you are suddenly old and there is a spaceship hovering over NYC. The aliens are very interested in people who can’t seem to form long-term memories. Don’t panic. It’ll all make sense soon. A quick dip into a deep concept, which the author admits has been done many other times in numerous other ways.


In Fading Suns and Dying Moons: Things that resemble human beings are marching in straight lines all over the planet, collecting butterflies. Is that all aliens want from us? What happens after the harvest? A fun little story with a good central image that won’t leave my mind.


The Flying Dutchman: This isn’t sci-fi. This is an account of a typical experience navigating the United States by way of air travel. Nothing weird going on here.


Good Intentions: Even a deal with the Devil can’t get someone elected in American politics because there are forces on Earth that are way more evil than the Devil himself. This story was published in 1992. After the Trump administration, this story doesn’t even count as hyperbole. Welcome to post-2016 America, where the line between absurd and real has blurred so much we can’t tell the difference. Even satire can’t keep up—what was once rollicking seems bland, and it wasn’t that long ago.


The Bellman: Another murder mystery from the same person who tackled the Barbie case. Someone on the moon colony is taking babies from pregnant women, but why? This is the story’s debut, and while astonishingly graphic for the author, I didn’t find it as interesting as the Barbie Murders.


*
The autobiographical sections sketching Varley’s life and career as a science fiction author, placing these stories in context with the time they were written, upstage the stories they introduce. No matter how fantastical the fiction is, it can never be as fantastic and unbelievable as 1970s America.

When short stories paid the rent.

When one could get into the publishing world, and all the privileges and perks ascribed to all members until the end of time, from a single story sold to a single anthology and a chance encounter with a single editor, and from then on you’re “in.”

All I can think is why wasn’t I born into a time when a single short story sale paid a month’s rent with money to spare? When short stories were actually lucrative? Maybe I enjoy torturing myself reading about the United States my parents raised me to be part of and was gone by the time I graduated high school. I used to get inspired reading about the easy successes of of Baby Boomers (I’m looking at you, T. S. Garp, Goodreads book report). Now I’m frustrated that those times are gone and never coming back. If the internet didn’t kill it, the corporate takeover of America certainly has. Playboy paid $5K for “Good Intentions.” Playboy once accepted unsolicited fiction submissions. That ended a long time ago, essentially making it dead as a short story market. Think about that.

The fiction is entertaining, but the real story of a bygone era in the USA is far more potent.

[Nooilforpacifists · Rating 4 out of 5]

I now have finished this book.

I stopped to review a jaw-dropping story called “The Pusher.” Varley’s always been best with short fiction (his snatch-people-about-to-die-from-an-airplane was a five star story, a three star novel, and a one star movie). This is similar in that it toys with the reader, dropping plenty of clues, most of which are McGuffins, before settling on an HEA I hadn’t dreamed of. Can’t wait to read the rest.

I now am done with this book. And remember when I first read the last graph of the title story. This book is an excellent selection of Varley’s early short stories, with biographical details about the impetus for each—which I believe was published in this volume first. Suffice it to say Varley’s a few years older than me, can write SF better then me (never tried; my writing strictly is non-fiction), and a heck of a lot better at pulling himself up by his bootstraps.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

As you might have gathered from the title, this is a collection of stories from author John Varley. I've only read a little of Varley, but I've always been a little intrigued, and a little intimidated by the prospect of reading his novels, the latter largely because they're mostly set in one universe and I'm not sure the best starting point. But I've heard interesting things, and have vaguely positive recollections of the few stories I remember reading in short story collections. So when I saw a collection of just his short stories in a used bookstore for cheap, I had to give it a chance.

And I'm quite glad I did, overall.

Normally, it stands to reason to talk about the stories first and foremost in a collection of short stories. But I want to talk about the introductions first. Each story in this collection comes with a fairly lengthy introduction, often not just briefly mentioning the idea behind the story, but also long rambling asides about his life at the time. This could easily get boring, but instead, it was fascinating, you get an interesting sense of the man, insight into what it's like starting out in SF (or at least, what it was like in the 70s), living in different places in the US, how Hollywood works, the writing process, and other details. While I won't say the introductions were the highlight of the book, they were an unexpectedly pleasant surprise, and I made sure to read them even for stories that I was already familiar enough with that I felt I could skip rereading.

As for the stories, they're somewhat of a mixed bag. Most, though not all of them, are set in one of two (similar in some ways but unrelated) ongoing universes of stories. One is Varley's "Eight Worlds" universe, the setting of many of his novels, in which Mankind has been kicked off Earth by powerful and inscrutable aliens but allowed the run of the rest of the solar system, and technology has significantly advanced enabling people to change gender on a whim and back themselves up in case of death. The other is a set of sci-fi procedurals focused on a police detective living on the moon (where body modifications, including gender alteration, are also relatively easy). Both are pretty interesting, although reading them all in a burst in one collection does become the biggest flaw... it can be a little repetitive.

Yet I still enjoyed most of them, and even the ones that I didn't I could usually find some nugget or image that I liked, and even when I felt certain ideas had been explored again and again, there were interesting takes on it.

In some way he was so ahead of his time that his social ideas still seem cutting edge (particularly with respect to gender). There's also a few eyebrow-raising moments caused by differences from today's values and the values of the past combined with Varley's science fiction author tendencies to explore societies with different moral values. Some of it is certainly shocking and perhaps offputting to certain readers, and maybe even outright offensive, but I never got the impression that his personal character was evil-hearted in the slightest... just that he may have innocently used words that are hurtful, or toyed with concepts that most people don't want explored under any circumstances. There were definite off-notes for me nonetheless. It's perhaps ironic that the last story in the book was one that was supposed to be in the long-delayed collection "The Last Dangerous Visions" (the never-materialized third installment of a series that boldly tried to tell stories that would be banned anywhere else)... and it's almost one of the most tame, by today's standards, a bit on the gruesome side but nothing compared to hit TV shows today.

On the whole, one of the better single-author collections I've read, and it does make me want to check out Varley's novels at some point... although I'm still not entirely sure where I should start.

I'm giving it four stars although I think it's rounded up from the high three-and-a-half-to-four-star range. May not be for everyone though, particularly for those who have trouble separating fiction in which certain acts are not portrayed negatively from active endorsement of those acts.

[Adam Meek · Rating 3 out of 5]

Varley is a wildly inventive and original writer, but he's also a hippie and a dirty old man, so I have to dock some points. Several of these stories had oldsters seducing teens or other disgusting stomach churning moments that I can tell we are supposed to think are just groovy baby. His intros feature gripes about Rush Limbaugh and political correctness and are about what you'd expect from an old hippie.

[solo · Rating 5 out of 5]

the 5 stars is mainly for "Press Enter []", "Tango Charlie and Foxtrot Romeo" and "The Persistence of Vision". some of the others are OK, the rest is filler...

[Shan]

Anthology starting with his first published story, Picnic at Nearside, from 1974. Each story has a personal introduction. I got a kick out of the first introduction, in which he mentions a high school librarian who handed him a Heinlein book and compares it to giving someone a free sample of an addictive drug. Varley's the same age as my older sister and my first husband, both of whom died long ago, and reading that intro was a lot like listening to them talk. A trip down memory lane for me.

Picnic at Nearside (novelette) - A couple of kids from the moon's farside sneak off to nearside's abandoned settlement and encounter an old man who seems like someone from our time. It's a view of us from an outside perspective kind of story, not a cautionary tale a la Planet of the Apes (Earth has been vanquished by aliens, not by our own weapons) but more a chance to think about how things can be different. Farside has 'engineers' who can change pretty much anything about a person's body, keeping people alive for hundreds of years, changing their gender, etc. The gender change idea was interesting, reading this in 2025; it's not such a big deal on farside because people can change back and forth as many times as they want. And because of this, there aren't defined gender roles. There's an early scene where the main character's best friend has changed to female and, not knowing how she's supposed to act, adopts a persona from old movies (cooking, cleaning, serving, nurturing).

Overdrawn at the Memory Bank - Also set on the moon, important because in moving there we left the dangerous viruses and bacteria behind, which has to be the only reason a class full of sticky-fingered 10-year-olds is in the same room with Fingal, whose brain is exposed while his consciousness is enjoying a temporary transplant into a lion at Disney's Kenya experience. The story mainly takes place while he's stuck in the memory cube after removal from the lion. It reminded me of the most recent Neal Stephenson book I read, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell, and maybe Lock In. That idea of leaving disease germs behind was interesting; my first thought was "well, nobody knew about the microbiome in the 70s" which turns out to more accurately be "I didn't know about it then," and now I'm thinking I should go back and finally finish reading I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life.

In the Hall of the Martian Kings - A small group of scientists is stranded on Mars after an accident with the habitat kills most of their colleagues, including the pilot. There's some fun technical detail, such as using the heat and moisture the humans generate inside the habitat to keep the habitat habitable, although in this case that practice is what activates the plastic-based tech that caused the accident. This is another one from the 70s and some of it's reminiscent of Heinlein's cringier output, with its freewheeling sex and naked women; the story's answer to what kind of society people would create when cut off from the rest of humanity was less interesting to me than the technical bits, especially what happens with that plastic-based stuff.

[Angie Boyter · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have read some novels by Varley over the years and remember enjoying them, so I was optimistic about this book even though I am not usually a reader of short stories.
He turned me off before the first story even began. Each story is introduced by an insight into Varley's life, and the first story is prefaced by a description of his days as a ne'er do well and druggie. Some of the pieces give some background on why he wrote a particular story, e.g., being inspired by seeing a spider in a zucchini stem, and that was fun, but I really am not interested in where he moved or what kind of house he lived in, etc.
On to the stories. They seemed for the most part rather sophomoric, amateurish, not very credible world-building, etc. He enjoys writing in an immature way about sex , nudity, etc. I quit about 40% of the way through, having not enjoyed ANY of the stories.
BTW it does not help that the kindle edition had no breaks such as a blank line between scenes, so I more than once said "Hunh?" because there was no clue that time had passed or the location had changed.
He commented in the book that he does not go back to edit or rewrite stories. That MAY be part of his problem, although some of the stories were probably beyond salvation.
Coincidentally, after I gave up on Varley I picked up and so far am THOROUGHLY enjoying Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect. In it the narrator uses the term "Chekhov's gun ", which refers to any seemingly unimportant element that becomes significant later on in the story. “Remove everything that has no relevance to the story,” Chekhov wrote. “If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off." Varley should have heeded this advice, in both the stories and his introductions to each.

[Austin Beeman · Rating 4 out of 5]

RATED 83% POSITIVE. STORY SCORE 4.06 OF 5
18 STORIES : 7 GREAT /6 GOOD / 4 AVERAGE / 1 POOR / 0 DNF

There are two reasons you might want to read The John Varley Reader …. and one reason why you might want to stay away..

+ John Varley is one of the masters of the science fiction story. His world-building is rich and detailed. His plots are complex and fulfilling. His characters are real and believable. You never know where you are headed in a Varley story, but it is always serious science fiction.

+ The introductions to these stories are long autobiographical looks at John Varley’s life … and he’s had an interesting one. In typical Varley fashion, this is eminently readable and feels like he is truly pouring his life onto the page. You could remove these introductions and mold a publishable biography out of them. I didn’t think I cared about John Varley’s life. I’m still not sure I do, but I couldn’t tear myself away from the writing.

- John Varley has an obsession with writing about sexual relationships between adults and children. It isn’t in every story, but it happens so frequently that it feels like every story. Almost always between adult men and teenage girls who are “mature for their age.”

I want to make clear that I haven’t heard even a suspicion of Varley DOING anything awful with children, but many people will point to a movie review on his blog that appears to be very sympathetic to men that abuse children. https://varley.net/movie_review/woods... and I’ll quote from the blog post a segment that many people consider a confession of his feelings.

“Pedophilia is something that runs the gamut from John Wayne Gacy to guys (like me) who look at a nubile 15-year-old and feel a hot flash of guilt because she is so sexually attractive. What makes Walter different from me is that he feels that flash for 10-year-olds, and he acts on it. He has spent 12 years in prison for having sex (no real details given, but it sounds like fondling) with a 10-year-old and a 12-year-old. He knows what he does is wrong and he wants to change. But the compulsion is still there.”

I look at Varley’s writing with a bit more grace. He had seen massive transformation is what was acceptable regarding race and gender and sexuality. It would only be rational to imagine that in the future anything deemed “immoral and unacceptable” today would eventually be seen as “acceptable and moral.” Even sexual relationships with children.

I’ll quote John Varley again from one of the story introductions.

"grew up in Texas in the 1950s, where there were segregated restrooms and drinking fountains. In my life I have gone from referring to a certain minority group as something we now call “The N-word,” which I didn’t even know was pejorative, to Negroes, to “spades” when that was fashionable in the Haight-Ashbury, to Afro-Americans, to black people, to people of color, to the current usage of African-American. My racism was of the unconscious, liberal variety. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was praised from the pulpit of my Lutheran church for the work he was doing in the South, but nobody in the pews, or in the pulpit for that matter, would have wanted him to marry their daughter.

When I began writing, we were in the most exciting years of the feminist movement. A few women somewhere burned a few bras as a lark, someone took a picture of it, and people started calling feminists bra-burners. That, or women’s-libbers, lesbians, ball-busters, or harpies. A favorite word to describe them was “strident.” I read a lot of the literature, saw their point, and did my best to shake off my sexism as I had shed myself of racism.

The gay rights movement was just getting started, hadn’t really made a lot of noise yet. No need to go through the terms that were thrown around at them.

We have come such a long way. Consider, in this day and age when Queer Eye for the Straight Guy is a big hit on television, that in my high school days it would have been about the deadliest insult you could hurl. Fightin’ words. Now it is a word of pride. Sure, there are still toothless rednecks who feel themselves superior to Nelson Mandela because they are white. There are those who love to beat the crap out of people because of who they choose to go to bed with. There are those like a certain big fat lying hypocritical junkie crybaby felon who calls progressive women “feminazis.” There is much still to do and I don’t know where it will all end up, but compare today in America to 1955 in Texas, like I do, and you will know there has been much progress.

Back when I started writing, everyone was exploring sex roles, redefining what it was to be a man or a woman, of whatever orientation. Nature or nurture? Is testosterone or estrogen all-powerful? Is a man gay because his mother made him wear dresses, or was he born that way? I spent a long time thinking about sex, and came to the conclusion that there is not one statement you can make about all men or about all women that is valid. People are now seeking equal rights for “gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and the transgendered.” I’m not even sure if that includes hermaphrodites, or the small minority of people who just plain don’t have any interest in sex at all. Neuters.

So what would things be like in … two or three hundred years? (I was always deliberately vague about dates in the Eight Worlds stories.) With the Earth subjugated by aliens who, if they weren’t actually God, could pinch-hit for him?

If you take a jump that far ahead in the world of Science fiction, you can postulate absolutely anything you want."

But also …. Varley also spent large parts is life in 1960s San Francisco counterculture and then Hollywood. Both are communities with extreme disregard for any sexual boundaries — either legal or moral.

Enough of this! There are Seven Stories that Make the All-Time Great List:
https://www.shortsf.com/beststories

The Barbie Murders • [Anna-Louise Bach] • (1978) • novelette by John Varley

Great. What if a community used surgery and thought control to achieve perfect uniformity? How would you solve a series of murders when everyone looks exactly alike, uses we, and doesn’t acknowledge difference?

The Phantom of Kansas • [Eight Worlds] • (1976) • novelette by John Varley

Great. For some people who live beneath the surface of Luna, immortality is assured by banks that will rebuild a clone of you and fill it with your memories on file. Our protagonist, a creator of ‘environmental experiences’ awakens to find that she is the 4th recent rebirth because she’s been murdered three times. With the help of the Central Computer, a policewoman, and her memories, she tries to hunt down the killer. A wonderful science fiction mystery that plays fair within a very interesting future world.

Beatnik Bayou • [Eight Worlds] • (1980) • novelette by John Varley

Great. A young man comes of age on a lunar colony with easy sex changes, age changes, intimate individualized education, computerized justice, and an artificially recreated southern Bayou.

The Persistence of Vision • (1978) • novella by John Varley

Great. A man bumming his way through life stumbles across a communal society created by people who lost sight and hearing due to radiation. Varley obviously has fun reiventing this strange utopia from the ground up, full of nudity, strange laws, and free love. Quite emotional as well. I hate calling something “problematic,” but it is hard not to…

Press Enter ▮? • (1984) • novella by John Varley

Great. There is some AI Sci-Fi stuff here, but the heart of this story is a riveting character study of a Korean War veteran and a young Asian woman who is investigating the apparent suicide of a neighborhood computer hacker.

Options • [Eight Worlds] • (1979) • novelette by John Varley

Great. Easy and simple sex changes are made possible through cloning and are beginning to become more popular. A wife becomes more and more interested in the idea while her husband is definitely against it. Surprised this is not more widely read as it is a great feminist use of gender transition in science fiction. Probably would if it had been written by someone without Varley's "Problems".

Just Another Perfect Day • (1989) • short story by John Varley

Great.. A note to yourself. You haven’t been able to make new memories for decades. Each day you reset your memory and this letter will help you through it. Also there is a UFO hovering over New York City.

Check out review of 86 Anthologies + 25 Author Collections + 14 Slates of Award Finalists + 3 Magazine Issues + 1 Novel(la) at https://www.shortsf.com

***

THE JOHN VARLEY READER
18 STORIES : 7 GREAT / 6 GOOD / 4 AVERAGE / 1 POOR / 0 DNF

Picnic on Nearside • [Eight Worlds] • (1974) • novelette by John Varley

Average. A young man wants a sex change - which doesn’t have any gravitas in this future - but his mother thinks he’s too young. So he goes on a ‘road trip” with a buddy who is now a girl.

Overdrawn at the Memory Bank • [Eight Worlds] • (1976) • novelette by John Varley

Good. A man finds himself having to deal with life trapped in VR while the outside world tries to find his body.

In the Hall of the Martian Kings • (1976) • novella by John Varley

Good. A Martian expedition finds themselves stranded after a disaster and must come up with a way to survive together for years until help can arrive.

Gotta Sing, Gotta Dance • [Eight Worlds] • (1976) • novelette by John Varley

Average. A story of part man / part plant music composers from the rings of Saturn. Forgot this one almost as soon as I read it.

The Barbie Murders • [Anna-Louise Bach] • (1978) • novelette by John Varley

Great. What if a community used surgery and thought control to achieve perfect uniformity? How would you solve a series of murders when everyone looks exactly alike, uses we, and doesn’t acknowledge difference?

The Phantom of Kansas • [Eight Worlds] • (1976) • novelette by John Varley

Great. For some people who live beneath the surface of Luna, immortality is assured by banks that will rebuild a clone of you and fill it with your memories on file. Our protagonist, a creator of ‘environmental experiences’ awakens to find that she is the 4th recent rebirth because she’s been murdered three times. With the help of the Central Computer, a policewoman, and her memories, she tries to hunt down the killer. A wonderful science fiction mystery that plays fair within a very interesting future world.

Beatnik Bayou • [Eight Worlds] • (1980) • novelette by John Varley

Great. A young man comes of age on a lunar colony with easy sex changes, age changes, intimate individualized education, computerized justice, and an artificially recreated southern Bayou.

Air Raid • (1977) • short story by John Varley

Good. Leaving a future where the world and her body is falling apart, a woman steps into the present day and takes over the life of a stewardess. Once aboard the flight, she begins shunting passengers unknowingly through other portals.

The Persistence of Vision • (1978) • novella by John Varley

Great. A man bumming his way through life stumbles across a communal society created by people who lost sight and hearing due to radiation. Varley obviously has fun reiventing this strange utopia from the ground up, full of nudity, strange laws, and free love. Quite emotional as well. I hate calling something “problematic,” but it is hard not to…

Press Enter ▮? • (1984) • novella by John Varley

Great. There is some AI Sci-Fi stuff here, but the heart of this story is a riveting character study of a Korean War veteran and a young Asian woman who is investigating the apparent suicide of a neighborhood computer hacker.

The Pusher • (1981) • short story by John Varley

Good.. A disturbing story of an alien man who targets a young girl on a playground to tell her a story that will change her future. It is too subtle and it is easy to miss why this isn’t the ‘grooming’ of a child, but I can’t tell you why without spoiling it.

Tango Charlie and Foxtrot Romeo • [Anna-Louise Bach] • (1986) • novella by John Varley

Good. A orbital space station has been quarantined to prevent an outbreak that killed every living think onboard and could have ended life on earth. But now, there appears to be a young girl and some dogs onboard. Should they try to rescue her? Or leave her there for the safety of everyone else.

Options • [Eight Worlds] • (1979) • novelette by John Varley

Great. Easy and simple sex changes are made possible through cloning and are beginning to become more popular. A wife becomes more and more interested in the idea while her husband is definitely against it. Surprised this is not more widely read as it is a great feminist use of gender transition in science fiction. Probably would if it had been written by someone without Varley's "Problems".

Just Another Perfect Day • (1989) • short story by John Varley

Great.. A note to yourself. You haven’t been able to make new memories for decades. Each day you reset your memory and this letter will help you through it. Also there is a UFO hovering over New York City.

In Fading Suns and Dying Moons • (2003) • novelette by John Varley

Good. A Lepidopterist is grab by the military to try to understand why aliens have come to earth. All they are doing is standing in a straight line and collecting butterflies.

The Flying Dutchman • (1998) • short story by John Varley

Average. A hellish descent into madness as the uncomfortable aspects of modern airline travel descend into supernatural dread.

Good Intentions • (1992) • short story by John Varley

Poor. Even a deal with the literal devil isn’t enough to overcome being bad at electoral politics.

The Bellman • [Anna-Louise Bach] • (2003) • novelette by John Varley

Average. Action packed thriller on a domed lunar city. A pregnant police officer makes herself ‘bait’ for a serial killer who is killing pregnant women.

[Megan · Rating 1 out of 5]

I sought this out because I'm slowly working my way through Jo Walton's An Informal History of the Hugos, and Varley keeps getting brought up again and again as basically some kinda genius. After struggling through an increasingly disheartening collection, I feel like all it had done for me is seriously call into question the taste and judgement of all the people lauding him in the Informal History. There are moments when I can try to imagine reading him for the first time in the 70s or whatever, and I guess, yeah, I can see why he could've been considered fresh, but now it's like trying to eat that box of cereal you forgot in the back of your cupboard for a few years, because you feel guilty throwing it away. There's a staleness to everything-- at one point in an intro to a story, he writes, "I'm not going to indulge in a diatribe about political correctness here, though I believe it is one of the most noisome scourges of our age." Oh, really, John? I'm shocked.

Don't read this book unless you enjoy the following:

-lots of creepy, voyeuristic descriptions of children having sex, usually with much older people who are either teachers or parental figures

-overtly racist and sexist descriptions, maddeningly juxtaposed with self-congratulatory story intros where he wanks on about how proud he is that he no longer uses the n-word, and supported "bra-burners" back when that was, like, heavy, man.

-oh, I almost forgot about the horror story where a man has to sit on an airplane between 2 fat people, one of whom is a fat woman, and the other is an even fatter man, but then Varley was like, 'Mmm, this feels unbalanced, because obviously even a very fat man isn't as utterly repulsive as a moderately fat woman,' so he made the fat man be constantly puking. And then a lot of minimum-wage workers get shot in humorous ways.


I hate John Varley. I don't know if I'm just not old enough or if it's because I never smoked weed OR MAYBE IT'S BECAUSE HE'S AWFUL, but either way, I'm so effing done with him and will hereafter, in used bookstores across the land, give every tattered paperback with his name on it a scowl and the finger and I don't care who sees me and thinks I'm crazy.

[Nicholas Armstrong · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love Varley; I can't not love his stuff. Some of his stories are more... manicured than others, but overall, I love it. Unfortunately, I'm picky as hell with short stories. For some reason, I feel that short stories should have this point, or, maybe not a point per se, but a goal. I need to see a finish line, something that short story has been building up to each time. In essence, a short story isn't a novel; it is a different creature. It's purpose is separate. Where a novel can exist purely for entertainment value, purely for character development, a short story cannot (in my mind). I feel they have different purposes and this separates them.

Unfortunately, a few of the stories here don't seem to make the same connection. Some of the them (one about dogs that slips my mind) feels entirely... pointless. The story ends where it began, even going so far as to erase the impact of the story on the protagonists life. It was unfulfilling. Some of the stories are complete gems, really, fantastic. Others, however, such as some of the more acclaimed stories (The Persistence of Vision), had no impact on me whatsoever. I felt lost -- which may be a short-coming on my part -- on what it was that was supposed to make these amazing. The subject matter, sure, was different than what I had read before, but the artistry, the sheer beauty of it, seemed lacking.

I enjoyed this as I enjoy any Varley. I just wish I had enjoyed it more.

[David Roy · Rating 4 out of 5]

John Varley is a master at driving the reader into a fearful full fetal curled up ball in the corner. His stories stick around for a long time. The ingredients in his stories include science fiction, fantasy, and horror. In particular, the horror is the stickiest ingredient and, I would add, probably the most dominant of the three most of the time. When I fly and connections fall apart, I think of "The Flying Dutchman," and shudder. Is this what is happening to me? Will I ever get home? It goes with the realization that I am not in control of reaching my destiny -- which happened in Hawaii as we were about to return home but the earthquake knocked out TSA's ability to scan so, after hours of waiting, we had to find a hotel with no promise of when we'd be able to fly.

Then there is Press ENTER. Anonymous phone calls, bizarre instructions, long silences on the phone, heads blown away or blown up with a microwave. An unknown, uncontrollable power looming around everything, no safety. Very effective chill. Today, we have some hints about how vulnerable we are via the computer.

Varley reaches deep into reality and pulls out some of the guts we did not know even existed, then weaves those guts into imaginative and compelling designs.

[Ketan Shah]

A very worthwhile collection of great Sci fi.John Varly has been writing for a while,and it shows in the assuredness of these stories."Overdrawn at The Memory Bank" has a very Philip K Dick feel to it. Other stories like Air Raid and THe Barbie Murders are entirely Varley's own style,and Persistence of Vision is an amazing story that puts you in the heart of a deaf mute community.Any one who watched 50 First Dates will find the plot of Just Another Perfect Day familiar.(Varley's short story was published long before the movie was made)If you enjoy Varley's work,you might enjoy the work of Robert Silverberg and George Turner (especially Brain Child). James Tiptree Jr also explores the gender issues that Varley does in stories like Options.

[martha · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read half of this before I had to return it to the library, tho' I plan to maybe get it out again. Hugely creative short stories, hugely offensive to women, or at best tediously sex-obsessed. All the stories I read had awesome premises, and all invariably degenerated into talk about the need for free love communes or, in one of his most award-winning stories, sex with a 13 year old girl. You could tell he'd cut his teeth on Heinlein. Sigh sigh sigh.

[Peter Johnston · Rating 1 out of 5]

This would have been a four star reviews, except an otherwise solid to excellent collection of stories is marred by a sexually explicit story glorifying pedophilia.

[Norman Cook · Rating 4 out of 5]

John Varley burst onto the science fiction scene in 1974 and for about a decade or so was the hottest writer in the field. Although he has continued to write up until recently, he rarely showed up on award ballots after the mid 1980s. But those first stories are amazing, with two or three bona fide all-time classics and a handful of others almost as good—certainly an incredible decade by any standards. His style seems influenced by Robert Heinlein, but with a definite updating to include such things as gender identity and equality. The history of science fiction is not complete without a substantial dip into Varley's oeuvre. Varley's lengthy introductions provide not only insights about the stories themselves, but provide biographical insights about Varley himself.

"Picnic on Nearside" (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, August 1974 - novelette)
3 Stars
Two young people travel to the nearside (as seen from Earth) of the Moon for a picnic and find more than they bargain for. It's a coming of age story that introduces a couple of recurring themes in Varley's work: easy and routine gender switching, and the migration of humanity off Earth to colonize the Solar System after aliens invade Earth.

"Overdrawn at the Memory Bank" (Galaxy, May 1976 - novelette)
3 Stars
At first glance, this seems like Varley's attempt at cyberpunk, although it predates William Gibson's Neuromancer by 8 years. The writing style is a bit clunky, with "Mr. Exposition Man" making a number of appearances. For some convoluted reasons, a man transfers his memories into an electronic brain, but the clinic somehow loses his body, trapping him, at least temporarily, in a virtual reality simulation. The story was made into a not very good 1983 episode of the PBS series American Playhouse starring Raul Julia (that was riffed by Mystery Science Theater 3000 in 1997).

"In the Hall of the Martian Kings" (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, February 1977 - novella)
1978 Hugo Award finalist
4 Stars
This starts out much like Andy Weir's The Martian (2012), with an accident stranding a group of astronauts on Mars. The story takes a decidedly different turn, though, when Martian life forms start to appear. This is more of a story about relationships than technical prowess. How would one cope with a situation like this?

"Gotta Sing, Gotta Dance" (Galaxy, July 1976 - novelette)
1977 Hugo Award finalist
4 Stars
Varley continues his exploration of body modification with this tale of a human named Barnum symbiotically fused to a sentient plant named Bailey. They live in the harsh environment of Saturn's rings, but travel to the planetoid Janus where a talent scout attempts to turn music of theirs into something publishable. Eventually, it becomes a tale of love and how future technology could enable the development of what is essentially a living Theremin.

"The Barbie Murders" (Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, January-February 1978 - novelette)
1979 Hugo Award finalist
4 Stars
This is part of the series that features police detective Anna-Louise Bach. In this tale, Bach investigates murders occurring at a lunar city inhabited by members of a peculiar religious sect who surgically modify themselves to look identical, derisively nicknamed "barbies" by outsiders. It's a puzzle story: how do you identify a single individual when every suspect looks alike and they all profess to have a group identity. It's a fun story as is, but it could have been great if Varley had delved more into the society of sameness he creates. I think if Varley had written this today, with many people opting for non-gender identities, it would look a lot different. Nevertheless, for a story written over forty years ago it resonates with gender identity issues of today.

"The Phantom of Kansas" (Galaxy, February 1976 - novelette)
1977 Hugo Award finalist
3 Stars
In a world where cloning and cyber-transfer of consciousness is common, the solution to this murder mystery is pretty obvious. The motive is less obvious and seems a little contrived. Plus, there's an ick-factor when the protagonist has sex with her male clone.

"Beatnik Bayou" (New Voices III: The Campbell Award Nominees, April 1980 - novelette)
1981 Hugo Award finalist and 1981 Nebula Award finalist
4 Stars
This is a coming of age story set in a simulated Louisiana swamp on the Moon. It's full of Varley's trademarks such as gender identity, cybernetic memory transfer, and uninhibited sex, as well as an all-knowing computer that replaces judge and jury in disputes. As with a lot of Varley's stories, there is a lot to unpack and a lot that could have been expanded upon, but what is here is poignant.

"Air Raid" (as by Herb Boehm) (Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, Spring 1977 - short story)
1978 Hugo Award finalist and 1978 Nebula Award finalist
5 Stars
Horribly sick and deformed inhabitants of an environmentally degraded future earth travel back to the current era to rescue victims of mass disasters just before their deaths to provide healthy human stock to keep the species alive. Expanded into the novel Millennium (1983) (1984 Hugo Award finalist) which was adapted into the film Millennium (1989).

"The Persistence of Vision" (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, March 1978 - novella)
1979 Hugo Award winner and 1979 Nebula Award winner
5 Stars
This is an amazing examination of the thought experiment: how would a colony of deaf-blind people live? There's not much science fiction here—it's set in an economic downturn in the "future" of the 1990s and there's just a tad of magic realism near the end—but there is a lot of emotional depth. There is also a bit of an ick-factor whereby a middle aged man has sex with a thirteen-year-old girl (although Varley never shied away from unconventional gender and sexual depictions) and it makes sense within the context of the story.

"Press Enter ■" (Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, May 1984 - novella) 1985 Hugo Award winner and 1985 Nebula Award winner
5 Stars
Considering that this was published when the internet was just getting started, and certainly nothing like it is today, this cautionary tale is probably more relevant now than in 1984. A super-hacker is found dead, apparently from suicide, but the investigating police detective sees enough inconsistencies to keep digging. He hires a 25-year-old forensic computer scientist to go through the hacker's files. She eventually starts a relationship with the hacker's neighbor, the protagonist of the story. He is twice her age and has PTSD from being captured and tortured in the Korean War. She is a refugee from Vietnam with her own lingering issues from that experience. What she finds and how it affects him is a chilling reminder that there are agencies who control and manipulate world events, perhaps even with AI, and that nowhere is completely safe from them.

"The Pusher" (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October 1981 - short story)
1982 Hugo Award winner and 1982 Nebula Award finalist
3 Stars
This is a story that requires careful reading to understand what's going on, and even so may be triggering for some people. A crewman on an interstellar ship takes advantage of the relativistic effects of his travels to meet young girls for purposes that are not completely wholesome, then revisits them later—months for him, years for her. It's well written, but hasn't aged well in today's woke world.

"Tango Charlie and Foxtrot Romeo" (Blue Champagne, January 1986 - novella)
4 Stars
An adventure of Anna-Louise Bach early in her career as she tries to save a young girl and her pack of dogs from dying before the space station they are trapped on crashes into the Moon. The story is full of twists as we find out the backstory of the girl and her existence on the station (code named Tango Charlie). The ending is a bit dark.

"Options" (Universe 9, May 1979 - novelette)
1980 Hugo Award finalist and 1980 Nebula Award finalist
4 Stars
This is an early exploration of what it means to be transgendered, showing how the introduction of cheap and easy sex changing could affect society and especially individuals. Not everyone is comfortable with changing sexual roles, but Varley posits that it won't necessarily have to be that way.

"Just Another Perfect Day" (Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone Magazine, June 1989 - short story)
3 Stars
A man with zero short term memory reads a letter he wrote to himself to orient himself to the world as it has changed since his debilitating accident. One of those changes is that aliens have invaded Earth and because of his disability he is one of the only people who can communicate with them. The aliens are interesting because they are apparently 4-dimensional beings who appear as 3-dimensional "shadows" in our world.

"In Fading Suns and Dying Moons" (Stars: Original Stories Based on the Songs of Janis Ian, August 2003 - novelette)
3 Stars
Here's another story with 4-dimensional aliens in our 3-dimensional world. This time they're collecting every butterfly and moth on Earth for unfathomable reasons. And then they leave, taking more than just butterflies from the solar system.

"The Flying Dutchman" (Lord of the Fantastic: Stories in Honor of Roger Zelazny, September 1998 - short story)
3 Stars
In a story fit for the Twilight Zone, the hell of air travel is told in all its exaggerated glory.

"Good Intentions" (Playboy, November 1992 - short story)
3 Stars
This is a take on the oft told tale of a man tempted by Satan. It's reasonably humorous, as a struggling politician makes a deal with old Nick, but old Nick fails to uphold his end of the bargain.

"The Bellman" (Asimov's Science Fiction, June 2003 - novelette)
4 Stars
This was written in the late 1970s for Harlan Ellison's The Last Dangerous Visions, but Varley took it back when it was clear Ellison wasn't going to publish the anthology. It was surely a dangerous vision for its time, as there are some disturbing images, but in today's world it would probably make a routine episode of Law and Order: SVU. A serial killer nicknamed The Bellman is going after pregnant women. Anna-Louise Bach, herself almost 9 months pregnant, goes undercover in a sting operation to lure out the killer. Things go south very quickly, and Bach and her unborn child are put in grave danger.

[George McDonald · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lots of great stories in here, but the whole book is worth the price of admission for his two masterpieces, The Persistence of Vision, and the brilliant Press Enter. The latter gave me the creeps just as much as it did when first published in 1984. After forty years, this cautionary tale about AI seem amazingly prescient, and very relevant.

[Jon Pennycook · Rating 4 out of 5]

good collection

I think I only skipped one story and abandoned another - otherwise a good collection.
Sex transitions are easy in some stories, and it's made clear that sex and reproduction are separate. This leads to some intergenerational relationships that would make even Gentry Lee blush.

[Augusto Delgado · Rating 5 out of 5]

The greatest hits conundrum. It happened before, it will inevitably happen ever after.

You lot remember the urge of getting "Positively 4th Street" in spite of already having the rest of the songs in that bard's compilation. Well, this Reader has the same feel, sort of. There are huge chunks of previous albums er... books, mostly from "The Persistence of Vision" and "Blue Champagne."

But, then again, there are about half a dozen B-sides and new stories. They are not all as great as the ones in the original books and seem a tad outdated -I'm talking about computer printouts and phone booths still operating in a lunar future centuries from now, though the writer is not to blame for it as they very efficiently wrap the stories of Anna Bach and one has to consider that they were written a while ago- and misplaced in the anthology like "the Flying Dutchman." Still the gender fluidity issue in the background of several of them is brilliantly dealt by Varley, he certainly was way ahead of those (and even these) prejudiced times.
As a bonus, every story has an introduction and sometimes a closing note by the author. Those are very funny and set the mood for what's coming next. Only regret is he forgot to include the Janis Ian's lyrics opening "In Fading Suns and Dying Moons" as it was printed in the anthology commissioned by the science fiction fan amazing songwriter [Stars: Original Stories Based on the Songs of Janis Ian]

Don't miss this excellent compilation, even if you can grab the original books.

[Andreas · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collects all of Varley’s short fiction to date. What really makes the book shine, though, are the introductions to the stories. Eminently readable little anectodes from the author’s interesting life. Even with only the introductions and no stories, this would have been a great (albeit rather short) book. The stories are wide ranging from drama to action, with Varley’s sublime characterization always front and center. A great book.

http://www.books.rosboch.net/?p=1457

[Timothy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Picnic on Nearside (1974)
Overdrawn at the Memory Bank (1976)
In the Hall of the Martian Kings (1976)
Gotta Sing, Gotta Dance (1976)
The Barbie Murders (1978)
The Phantom of Kansas (1976)
Beatnik Bayou (1980)
Air Raid (1977)
The Persistence of Vision (1978)
Press Enter (1984)
The Pusher (1981)
Tango Charlie and Foxtrot Romeo (1986)
Options (1979)
Just Another Perfect Day (1989)
In Fading Suns and Dying Moons (2003)
The Flying Dutchman (1998)
Good Intentions (1992)
The Bellman (2003)

[Doug · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've never read any Varley before. Dinner of the stories were pretty good, others just ok. One thing that sort of jumped out at me was a repetition of the older man - younger woman sexual relationship. I got a little tired of it, in fact.

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent collection of short stories. Most were enjoyable and yet made you think at the same time.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Varley is an amazing SciFi writer and I thoroughly enjoyed this collection of stories. It was at the tail end of my "to-read" list, a gem waiting to be uncovered.

[ashes ➷ · Rating 2 out of 5]

Did I read a different book from you people??

Rec'd this by a(n older, male) buddy who is a big SFF nerd, on the basis of my interest in Bradbury. And I will grant that I am wayyyyy too charitable to Bradbury when he's being racist/sexist/etc. But this was really beyond anything I could have expected even from the '60s and I have to DNF after the 9348509348698th reference to a super sexy woman our protagonist is now going to bone.

I first read PRESS ENTER, both on recommendation from said buddy and because it seems to be one of Varley's most famous and/or popular works. It's a pretty simple story dated by the panic over computers doing things by themselves, affecting the people who work on them, even... killing people?! (GASP!)

Of course, that's not a problem. I do think modern audiences will generally find it harder to really get into these sorts of premises, simply because we now (rightfully) see fears of our computers killing us as largely unfounded, but a dated story is not inherently a bad one.

Unless it gets really, really racist.

PRESS ENTER introduces us to Lisa Foo, a sexy-but-awkward Asian girl hacker trope. She's Vietnamese, experienced rape and trauma in Cambodia during the war, coped with that by getting fake breasts in America, often sits in "lotus position," and occasionally slips into an exagerrated accent for apparent comedy purposes. I mean, this is her introduction, the one Varley chose to write for some reason:

Where does one start in describing Lisa Foo? Remember when newspapers used to run editorial cartoons of Hirohito and Tojo, when the Times used the word “Jap” without embarrassment? Little guys with faces wide as footballs, ears like jug handles, thick glasses, two big rabbity buck teeth, and pencil-thin moustaches …

Leaving out only the moustache, she was a dead ringer for a cartoon Tojo. She had the glasses, and the ears, and the teeth. But her teeth had braces, like piano keys wrapped in barbed wire. And she was five-eight or five-nine and couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and ten. I’d have said a hundred, but added five pounds each for her breasts, so improbably large on her scrawny frame that all I could read of the message on her T-shirt was “POCK LIVE.” It was only when she turned sideways that I saw the esses before and after.

This is honestly enough for a reasonable person to DNF, but because I am unreasonable, I kept reading and therefore suffered this:

“Do I frighten you, Victor?”

“You did at first.”

“It’s my face, isn’t it?”

“It’s a generalized phobia of Orientals. I suppose I’m a racist. Not because I want to be.”

She nodded slowly, there in the dark. We were on the patio again, but the sun had gone down a long time ago. I can’t recall what we had talked about for all those hours. It had kept us busy, anyway.

“I have the same problem,” she said.

“Fear of Orientals?” I had meant it as a joke.

“Of Cambodians.” She let me take that in for a while, then went on. “When Saigon fell, I fled to Cambodia. It took me two years with stops when the Khmer Rouge put me in labor camps. I’m lucky to be alive, really.”

“I thought they called it Kampuchea now.”

She spat. I’m not even sure she was aware she had done it.

“It’s the People’s Republic of Syphilitic Dogs. The North Koreans treated you very badly, didn’t they, Victor?”

“That’s right.”

“Koreans are pus suckers.” I must have looked surprised, because she chuckled.

“You Americans feel so guilty about racism. As if you had invented it and nobody else—except maybe the South Africans and the Nazis—had ever practiced it as heinously as you. And you can’t tell one yellow face from another, so you think of the yellow races as one homogeneous block. When in fact Orientals are among the most racist peoples on the earth. The Vietnamese have hated the Cambodians for a thousand years. The Chinese hate the Japanese. The Koreans hate everybody. And everybody hates the ‘ethnic Chinese.’ The Chinese are the Jews of the east.”

“I’ve heard that.”

She nodded, lost in her own thoughts.

“And I hate all Cambodians,” she said, at last. “Like you, I don’t wish to. Most of the people who suffered in the camps were Cambodians. It was the genocidal leaders, the Pol Pot scum, who I should hate.” She looked at me. “But sometimes we don’t get a lot of choice about things like that, do we, Yank?”

I feel like I can just move on, and not even begin to explain why that's racist. Yes obviously she ends up sleeping with the much older white protagonist why would you even have to ask. Unfortunately I finished the story and it doesn't much redeem itself from there.

After that I figured I might just go back and start from the beginning, because, well, some Bradbury is pretty racist, too. I mean, nothing this racist, I don't think, but still, maybe I was just... unused to classic SFF? And it was a recommendation for a friend!

So I read Picnic on Nearside, and honestly, it was drastically better. Varley kind of throws every taboo into the mix-- incest, pedophilia, public sex and nudity, sex changes-- and though it doesn't necessarily all work, it does overwhelmingly feel like it's coming from a good place: the SFF author challenging us to consider why we view one thing as okay and the other as not. I don't think it's particularly effective, but it was also his first story and first sale, and is worth including on those grounds alone (even if the sex change stuff wasn't also pretty genuinely fun, if extremely tied to binary gender roles and poor writing on... sex and women generally). Bonus points for making Christianity an outdated religion only practiced by (literal?) loonies. Alright!, I thought. I can handle this.

So I moved on to Overdrawn at the Memory Bank. Here we find a gentleman stuck in... well, it would seem his own mind, in a sort of pre-Inception (pre-Paprika?) dreamscape-gone-wrong scenario, guided by a nearly-anonymous female employee on the outside. It probably won't surprise you that he begins envisioning her as an angel and falling for her. They don't wind up together, but there is a truly nauseating amount of focus on how much this guy likes this random benevolent woman essentially mothering him through the techsperience. Because obviously if a man is alone with a woman for 4.5 seconds he will begin wanting to have sex with her. (And of course she will also treat this as inevitable, and be gently amused!) I don't know. It's not the worst story, but it feels sprawling and aimless; there's less a plot and more a ton of opportunities to talk about this guy being into this woman and how his brain is weird while we wait for her to solve the problem.

Next story: In the Hall of the Martian Kings. By this point, I honestly should have acknowledged that this was simply not my cup of tea. In addition to being much wordier than I've ever preferred in my SFF, Varley's work follows a pretty simple formula: unique SFF concept, buried in exploratory ramblings about a bunch of barely connected things happening in sequence, and of course a heaping helpful of old timey bigotry. In this case, a bunch of humans are stranded in space, and of course you have the inevitable cis/het pairing because how could you not. Of course you have ~ oops pregnant ~ storyline because how could you not.

I REALLY wanted to like Gotta Sing, Gotta Dance because it involves fascinating, almost-ungendered symbiotic plant bonds. This is the absolute best premise we've been given so far, and it's actually really interestingly used to explore (albeit fairly simply) a few different artistic ideas. But-- again-- we're immediately introduced to a woman who, stop me if you've heard this one, is a grown adult but looks just like a teenager. And, yes, she gets with our main guy. And, yes, there's symbiote jealousy.

I don't mind if Varley's every SFF story is simply an excuse to put a man and woman together-- how much fiction do I adore that is simply an excuse to put two men or two women together-- but I do think he should be less ashamed about it. Every time I read one of these stories I felt pretty strongly that the Cool Part was the premise-- and yet that was never what Varley actually spent the most time on. The interesting SFF stuff always wound up taking a backseat to whatever deranged heterosexual drama Varley wanted to put on.

Sigh. This is not a charitable review. But this man's fiction was not particularly charitable towards me! I respect classics in a theoretical sense, and I absolutely respect the person who recommended me this, but my God, what a struggle. I don't think Varley is for me.

[Mike C · Rating 5 out of 5]

Listened to the audiobook. Varley was new to me as of this book. I learned of him via authors notes at the end of a short story collection by Alastair Reynolds, in which he referred to Varley as one of his favorite authors.

I loved the stories in this book, with perhaps one exception. They were varied and imaginative. They were somewhat whimsical at times and deadly serious at others. There were interesting introductory comments before each story that sometimes set up the story and sometimes just spoke of what the author was experiencing in his life at the time he wrote the story. He placed one set of comments after a story and it was almost like he had been reading my mind as I listened to the story. The comments addressed some very specific thoughts and/or questions I had while listening.

A few words of caution. First, one story involves an unfortunate theme of a dumpy old guy sleeping with an attractive young woman. Seems like some male authors like this angle. Wishful thinking on their part? Second, there is a fair amount of underage sex in the stories. A lot of these stories take place in a future settlement on the moon. In these stories, humans live a long time, change genders as easily as people get tattoos nowadays, and begin having sex at a very early age. It made me squirm just a bit. Third, the final story of the book is fairly disturbing. It felt more like a modern horror gross-out story than a sci-fi story, in some respects. Apparently it was designed to be part of an ill-fated, boundary pushing anthology that was to have been put together by Harlan Ellison.

Cringe inducing elements aside, I really loved this collection of stories. Highly recommended. I look forward to reading/listening to more of this author's work.

[Jeppe Larsen · Rating 5 out of 5]

John Varley is a writer that really excels in the short story format in my opinion. He also won most of his award for short stories. This collection is packed with 18 stories – all accompanied with a lengthy introduction by Varley.

Reading this collection definitely gives the impression that Varley lived through the sex, drugs and rock’n’roll era. Lots of stories deal with experiments with sex and drugs in some form at least. It is especially apparent in the various Eight World stories where biological gender swap is widely available. In The Phantom of Kansas the protagonist ends up having sex with a gender-swapped clone of herself, and in Options a married couple has to deal with how their relationship changes when both are biological male.

There is also stories like The Persistence of Vision where Varley becomes almost philosophical, where a man wandering a somewhat devestated USA comes accross a community of deafblind people who has developed a unique way of communication through touch. In Press Enter we get a lovely 80s cyberpunk-ish murder mystery story with overpowered hackers and a clever notion whether a computer program could be used in court as evidence for a personal signature. In The Barbie Murders we also get a clever murder mystery, with the added complication that victim belongs to a cult of identical “Barbies” without individuality, making it impossible to frame an individual killer.

There are hardly any bad stories in this collection and the various anecdotal stories Varley tells as introductions to each story, is also worth the time.

Also posted at https://shortsfreviews.com