John Varley (author)
 |
John Varley | |
|---|---|
 Varley in 1992 | |
| Born | John Herbert Varley August 9, 1947 Austin, Texas, U.S. |
| Occupation | Novelist, short story writer |
| Alma mater | Michigan State University |
| Period | 1974–present |
| Genre | Science fiction |
| Website | |
| varley | |
John Herbert Varley (born August 9, 1947) is an American science fiction writer.
Biography
[edit]Varley was born in Austin, Texas. He grew up in Fort Worth, moved to Port Arthur in 1957, graduated from Nederland High School—all in Texas—and went to Michigan State University on a National Merit Scholarship. He started as a physics major, switched to English, then left school before his 20th birthday and arrived in Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco 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 Market on Stanyan Street (since closed) 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 City, San Francisco again, Berkeley, and Los Angeles.
Varley 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". These stories are set a century or two after a race of mysterious and omnipotent aliens, the Invaders, have almost completely eradicated humans from the Earth (they regard whales and dolphins to be the superior Terran lifeforms and humans only a dangerous infestation). But humans have inhabited virtually every other corner of the solar system, often through the use of biological modifications learned, in part, by eavesdropping on alien communications.
Varley's "Overdrawn at the Memory Bank" was adapted and televised for PBS in 1983. 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.[1]
Varley is often compared[by whom?] to Robert A. Heinlein.[citation needed] In addition to a similarly descriptive writing style, similarities include a libertarian political perspective and advocacy of free love. Two of his connected novels, Steel Beach and The Golden Globe, include a sub-society of Heinleiners.[2][unreliable source?] 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, similar to the situation found in Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. Unlike Heinlein's lunar society, Varley's convict society on Charon maintains its criminal ways and is similar to the Mafia or the yakuza. His Thunder and Lightning series plays on his connection with Heinlein by deriving its main characters' names from many of Heinlein's characters, including Jubal, Manuel Garcia, Kelly, Podkayne, Cassie, and Polly, and by frequently dropping titles of Heinlein's novels in the dialogue.
In 2021, Varley announced a series of health problems including a quadruple bypass, COVID-19, and bacterial pneumonia.[3] Colleagues organized a crowdfunding campaign to pay his expenses while he was unable to write.[4] At that time he described himself as living near Vancouver, Washington.
Bibliography
[edit]Novels
[edit]| Year | Title | Series | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1977 | The Ophiuchi Hotline | Eight Worlds | Locus SF Award nominee, 1978[5] |
| 1979 | Titan | Gaea Trilogy | Nebula Award nominee, 1979;[6] Locus SF Award winner and Hugo nominee, 1980[7] |
| 1980 | Wizard | Gaea Trilogy | Hugo and Locus SF Awards nominee, 1981[8] |
| 1983 | Millennium | Philip K. Dick Award nominee, 1983;[9] Hugo and Locus Awards nominee, 1984[10] | |
| 1984 | Demon | Gaea Trilogy | Locus SF Award nominee, 1985[11] |
| 1992 | Steel Beach | Eight Worlds | Hugo and Locus SF Award nominee, 1993[12] |
| 1998 | The Golden Globe | Eight Worlds | Prometheus Award winner, 1999; Locus SF Award nominee, 1999[13] |
| 2003 | Red Thunder | Thunder and Lightning | Endeavour Award winner, 2004; Campbell Award nominee, 2004[14] |
| 2005 | Mammoth | ||
| 2006 | Red Lightning | Thunder and Lightning | |
| 2008 | Rolling Thunder | Thunder and Lightning | |
| 2012 | Slow Apocalypse | ||
| 2014 | Dark Lightning | Thunder and Lightning | |
| 2018 | Irontown Blues | Eight Worlds |
Short story collections
[edit]- The Persistence of Vision (1978) (UK: In the Hall of the Martian Kings)
- The Barbie Murders (1980) (republished as Picnic on Nearside, 1984)
- Blue Champagne (1986)
- The John Varley Reader: Thirty Years of Short Fiction (2004)
- Good-bye, Robinson Crusoe and Other Stories (2013)
Other
[edit]- Millennium – screenplay (1989) based on the short story "Air Raid" (as was the novel Millennium)
Awards
[edit]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 – Novelette–"The Barbie Murders"
- 1979 – Novella–"The Persistence of Vision"
- 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 Tour-Apollo Award, several Seiun Awards, Endeavour Award, 2009 Robert A. Heinlein Award and others.
References
[edit]- ^ Interview in St. Louis Post-Dispatch Monday, July 20, 1992
- ^ "Heinleiner". www.diclib.com. Retrieved February 17, 2019.
- ^ "What a year this has been – John Varley".
- ^ "Recovering – John Varley".
- ^ "1978 Award Winners & Nominees". Worlds Without End. Retrieved May 17, 2009.
- ^ "1979 Award Winners & Nominees". Worlds Without End. Retrieved May 17, 2009.
- ^ "1980 Award Winners & Nominees". Worlds Without End. Retrieved May 17, 2009.
- ^ "1981 Award Winners & Nominees". Worlds Without End. Retrieved May 17, 2009.
- ^ "1983 Award Winners & Nominees". Worlds Without End. Retrieved May 17, 2009.
- ^ "1984 Award Winners & Nominees". Worlds Without End. Retrieved May 17, 2009.
- ^ "1985 Award Winners & Nominees". Worlds Without End. Retrieved May 17, 2009.
- ^ "1993 Award Winners & Nominees". Worlds Without End. Retrieved May 17, 2009.
- ^ "1999 Award Winners & Nominees". Worlds Without End. Retrieved May 17, 2009.
- ^ "2004 Award Winners & Nominees". Worlds Without End. Retrieved May 17, 2009.
External links
[edit]
- Interview by Clarkesworld Magazine (October 2012)
- Interview by Republibot.com
- John Varley at IMDb
- John Varley at Library of Congress, with 23 library catalog records
- John Varley at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
- Official website
- Review of Varley's "Eight Worlds" stories by Jo Walton
- Varley Vade mecum: Bibliography, Gaea Maps Archived December 17, 2017, at the Wayback Machine
- 1947 births
- Living people
- 20th-century American novelists
- 21st-century American novelists
- American male novelists
- American male short story writers
- American science fiction writers
- Hugo Award-winning writers
- Nebula Award winners
- Endeavour Award winners
- Writers from Fort Worth, Texas
- Novelists from Oregon
- 20th-century American short story writers
- 21st-century American short story writers
- 20th-century American male writers
- 21st-century American male writers
- Novelists from Texas
- Writers from Austin, Texas