Everything about John Varley Author totally explained
» For other people named John Varley, see John Varley
John Herbert Varley (born
August 9,
1947 in
Austin, Texas) is an
American science fiction author.
Biography
Varley grew up in
Fort Worth, Texas, moved to
Port Arthur in 1957, and graduated from
Nederland High School. He went to
Michigan State University on a
National Merit Scholarship, because of the schools that he could afford, it was the farthest from Texas. He started as a physics major, switched to English, then left school before his 20th birthday and arrived in
San Francisco's
Haight-Ashbury just in time for the "
Summer of Love" in
1967. There he worked at various unskilled jobs, depended on
St. Anthony's Mission for meals, and panhandled outside the Cala (now Lucky) Market on Stanyan Street before deciding that writing had to be a better way to make a living. He was serendipitously present at
Woodstock in 1969 when his car ran out of gas a half-mile away. He also has lived at various times in
Portland and
Eugene, Oregon,
New York,
San Francisco again,
Berkeley, and
Los Angeles.
He has written several novels (his first attempt,
Gas Giant, was, he admits, "pretty bad") and numerous short stories, many of them in a
future history (
"The Eight Worlds") set a century or two after a race of mysterious and omnipotent aliens almost completely eradicated humans from the Earth (they regard
whales and
dolphins to be the superior Terran lifeforms and humans only an infestation), but humans have inhabited virtually every other corner of the solar system, often through the use of wild biological modifications partially learned from eavesdropping on alien communications. His detailed speculations on the ways humans might use advances in biological science were revelatory in the
1970s when his story collection
The Persistence of Vision was released. The title story in that collection won the
Hugo and
Nebula awards, and it has been suggested that "
Overdrawn at the Memory Bank", which was adapted and televised for PBS in 1985, may have inspired some portions of the movie
Total Recall (although the primary inspiration was clearly the credited source, the
Philip K. Dick story "
We Can Remember It for You Wholesale"). In addition, two of his short stories ("Options" and "Blue Champagne") were adapted into episodes of the short-lived 1998 Sci-Fi channel TV series
Welcome to Paradox.
Varley spent some years in Hollywood but the only tangible result of this stint was the film
Millennium. Of his
Millennium experience Varley said:
» "We had the first meeting on
Millennium in
1979. I ended up writing it six times. There were four different directors, and each time a new director came in I went over the whole thing with him and rewrote it. Each new director had his own ideas, and sometimes you'd gain something from that, but each time something's always lost in the process, so that by the time it went in front of the cameras, a lot of the vision was lost."
Varley is often compared to
Robert A. Heinlein. In addition to a similarly descriptive writing style, similarities include
free societies and
free love. Two of his connected novels,
Steel Beach and
The Golden Globe, posit a sub-society of
Heinleiners.
The Golden Globe also contains a society evolved from a prison colony on
Pluto and a second society evolved from it on Pluto's moon,
Charon—a situation most notably found in Heinlein's
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. Unlike Heinlein's lunar society, Varley's convict society is a cross between the
mafia and the
yakuza, only more so. This could be construed as a critique of Heinlein's novel and the ideas within it.
Varley is noteworthy for the frequent prominence of female characters, unusual in science fiction, and especially so among male authors of
hard science fiction. This prominence is visible not only in his Eight Worlds history where sex changes are routine, but in his other works as well. The idea of routine sex changes is also an example of the
sexual themes that color his works without dominating them.
John Varley has also written a trilogy of novels set in a hollow world reminiscent in structure to a very large
Stanford torus space habitat, but with a distinctly different personality. They are
Titan,
Wizard, and
Demon.
Bibliography
Novels
Short story collections
The Persistence of Vision (1978)
The Barbie Murders (1980) (republished as Picnic on Nearside, 1984)
Blue Champagne (1986)
Overdrawn At The Memory Bank (Short Story) (1976)
The John Varley Reader: Thirty Years of Short Fiction (2004)
Other
Millennium - screenplay (1989) based on the short story "Air Raid" (as was the novel Millennium)
Awards
Varley has won the Hugo Award three times:
1979 - Novella–"The Persistence of Vision"
1982 - Short Story–"The Pusher"
1985 - Novella–"Press Enter■"
and has been nominated a further twelve times.
He has won the Nebula Award twice:
1979 - Novella–"The Persistence of Vision"
1985 - Novella - "Press Enter■"
and has been nominated a further six times.
He has won the Locus Award ten times:
1976 - Special Locus Award–four novelettes in Top 10 ("Bagatelle", "Gotta Sing, Gotta Dance", "Overdrawn at the Memory Bank", "The Phantom of Kansas")
1979 - Novella–"The Persistence of Vision"
1979 - Novelette–"The Barbie Murders"
1979 - Single Author Collection–The Persistence of Vision
1980 - SF Novel–Titan
1981 - Single Author Collection–The Barbie Murders
1982 - Novella–"Blue Champagne"
1982 - Short Story–"The Pusher"
1985 - Novella - "Press Enter■"
1987 - Collection–Blue Champagne
Varley has also won the Jupiter Award, the Prix Apollo, several Seiun Awards, Endeavour Award and others.
Further Information
Get more info on 'John Varley Author'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://john_varley__author.totallyexplained.com">John Varley (author) Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
