John Varley

[J-Sun]

Here's an interesting review of John Varley by Russell Letson, specifically talking about the new collection, Goodbye, Robinson Crusoe.

I was struck by the comment Letson makes about how "etween this volume and the Reader, the bulk of Varley’s short fiction is now available". I did some digging and it turns out that my three collections of The Persistence of Vision, The Barbie Murders, and Blue Champagne contain 25 of Varley's 36 stories and could be gotten in three Berkley MMPB's for, originally, $8.15. The new pair are a mismatched hardcover and trade paper that contain 24 of the previously collected stories (dropping "Manikins") and adding five stories that were published after Blue Champagne (all in the Reader) giving 29 stories for 61 bucks. Especially since I've got at least two of the five in anthologies and/or magazines, I'll stick with my trio but it's nice to see them back in print in some form, no matter how odd. It's also a testament to Varley's short fiction skills that Crusoe is basically a "Rest of" Varley, assuming the Reader to be intended as a "Best of" and, while not every story is indispensable, the collection as whole would be - if you've just got the Reader, you shouldn't stop there.

The "Manikins" omission is interesting, though. It's arguably a topically dated story and perhaps philosphically disagreeable but it's certainly stylistically interesting and I don't really see why they'd drop it on purpose but they may have. It'd be pretty sloppy of them to simply miss it when the two publishers were obviously "conspiring" to produce a two-volume "Collected Stories".

And then there's the omission of the six stories that have never been collected (three from the 70s and three from the 90s/00s). It seems several of them are probably pretty trivial and one or two may have been apprentice works not up to snuff (but Varley had an astonishingly short apprenticeship) but, as Letson correctly (perhaps kindly) notes, if you're going to collect "Manhattan" and "Unprocessed", you might as well collect everything. Not that they're bad, but they're certainly "completist"-type stories.

Other than The Ophiuchi Hotline, I didn't really like any of his early novels and a couple of his later "comeback" novels are still in the SBR but they're very popular with some and this is a general purpose Varley thread if anyone wants it and the novels are as much fair game as the stories. Varley had/has some of the densest idea content and greatest unpretentious style of any writer and taught the cyberpunks most of what they knew and I just think he rivals Zelazny for "intense short fiction explosion" and is even more science fictional. However you get his stories, I hope you do get them,

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

Varley is one of those authors who made me say "Wow!" the first time I read anything he wrote. (It was either "Retrograde Summer" or "In the Bowl" or maybe both at nearly the same time.) I had a similar experience with George R. R. Martin ("The Second Kind of Loneliness") and Orson Scott Card ("The Monkeys Thought 'Twas All in Fun") and David Brin (Startide Rising.) I mention these together because they could all write clearly and vividly, and they all had great imagination. Well, since then Martin is a mainstream bestseller/superstar; Card is super-prolific; Brin has a solid career in SF and as a futurist of sorts; and Varley keeps going, but seems to almost fit into the "what ever happened to" category.

Let's just say Varley was one of the writers who took the best aspects of New Wave and Hard SF and made a delightful mixture of the two.

 

[J-Sun]

Let's just say Varley was one of the writers who took the best aspects of New Wave and Hard SF and made a delightful mixture of the two.

Excellent point - he really does: you could never mistake him for an "old-fashioned" author but he still has a sharpness of vision and description and there's a solidity to his future but there aren't many wiring diagrams and he's very interested in character without getting lost in subjectivity. I dunno - I'm probably not saying it right but you definitely put your finger on how he can sort of be the Platonic ideal of "good SF".