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John Varley has died
- zwb2324550 10mo ago[dead]
- toomuchtodo 10mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Varley_(author) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Varley_(author) https://varley.net/ https://varley.net/
- wang_li 10mo agoSteel Beach and Golden Globe are both great books.
- pinewurst 10mo agoAlso the Titan trilogy.
- black_13 10mo ago[dead]
- gautamcgoel 10mo agoMammoth and Red Thunder are both masterpieces.
- tpoacher 10mo ago"Press [ENTER]" is one of my favourite books. I picked it up one day with the intent to just read the first paragraph to see what it was about. 3-4 hours letter I had finished the book without realising. This happened again, twice. Such a good book. May he rest in peace.
- bathtub365 10mo agoWouldn’t reading the synopsis be a better way of discovering what a book is about than buying it and reading the first paragraph?
- ghaff 10mo agoNovella actually :-) Very good story. Published at about the same time as Vernor Vinge's True Names, which while quite different explored some of the same proto-Internet themes.
- mikestorrent 10mo agoThis story has been somewhere in the back of my head forgotten for decades. Thank you so much for the reminder, I'm going to re-read it. Kluge!!
- mikestorrent 10mo agoAnd I just finished it... "Do you think it could come through the pipes?" Such a good story. A little spicier than I had remembered. Thanks again for the reminder. It holds up surprisingly well on the technology front.
- Stratoscope 10mo ago> People change gender on a whim. This is one of the more fascinating things about Varley's world. Unlike today's primitive surgical and hormone treatments, they had a much more elegant solution. You would have a new body of the opposite sex grown in a tank, and when it was ready, a medico would remove your brain from your old body and place it into your new body. So instead of being in a medical approximation of your new gender, you really were that gender, with your old brain and all your memories intact. It was so commonplace that people may change back and forth many times. You might ask a friend in casual conversation, "When did you have your first Change?" A "medico" was something like what we would call a "doctor" today, but they were not considered nearly as highly skilled and highly paid. Basically a mechanic for your brain and body.
- zwnow 10mo ago[flagged]
- Stratoscope 10mo ago> did this future also eliminate being straight? Of course not. No one was forced or expected to have a Change. It was just an option available to anyone with the curiosity to wonder what it would be like to be the opposite sex - and experience that fully - and then switch back again if they preferred where they started. But you raise an interesting point. In the stories I read, all of the characters were "straight" in the way we think of that word today. This may be my poor memory, but I don't recall stories involving men who enjoy sex with men, or women who enjoy sex with women. When a man had his brain transplanted into a woman's body made just for him, then she was attracted to men. When a woman had her brain transplanted into a man's body made just for her, then he was attracted to women. The characters were straight, from the point of view of their current body. It's just that they could change that body whenever they wanted.
- zwnow 10mo agoI put my explanation in my earlier comment. Thats interesting, so their sexuality came from the bodies their brain was put into? So the brain essentially transforms too after that surgery. Like I know male and female brains have structural differences (which obviously doesnt have implications on anything else but the brains structure), but the experience people gather throughout their lifetime are heavily influenced by their gender.
- rob74 10mo ago> Long, long ago, when I was yet unpublished, I found myself talking with Isaac Asimov at I forget which convention, when John Varley cruised by, trailed by enthusiastic fans. Asimov gazed sadly after him and said, "Look at him. A decade ago, everybody was asking, 'Who is John Varley?' A decade from now, everybody will be asking, 'Who is Isaac Asimov?'" Asimov seems to have been a very modest man...
- lproven 10mo ago> Asimov seems to have been a very modest man... I never met him -- he hated travel, and I never could afford to go to a US convention -- but from all I've read, no, the absolute opposite was the case.
- adwelly 10mo agoPicnic on Nearside. Highly recommended.
- ciberado 10mo agoAt thirteen or fourteen, I was lucky enough to read "The Persistence of Vision" in a science fiction collection published by Orbis at such an affordable price that I could buy every volume with my weekly allowance. The stories had a powerful impact on me, because at that age concepts like the normalization of sex change or living a full life while being deaf-blind didn't fit into my mental frameworks. I enjoyed it from beginning to end, each and every one of the stories. Two months ago (almost forty years later) my mother found the old book in our family library, and I've been able to reread it, enjoying it as much or more than the first time. I remembered the general plot of all the stories perfectly, which is proof of their intrinsic quality, and we can clearly see their influence on later authors like my beloved Doctorow. The most curious thing is that some perspectives have shocked me again. Not the sex change, of course. Not raising children in a commune (whether on Earth or Mars). But sex between adults and minors is a topic that I'm sure makes me more uncomfortable now than when I was a kid. So, for the second time, I can only be grateful to the author for giving me a good time without condescension or fear of presenting societies different from my own. For making me think. And feel.
- nahuel0x 10mo agoAs someone who read The Persistence of Vision at almost the same age, I concur, it was transformative.
- pavlov 10mo agoI had the same experience at age 13. I'd read the American classics like Asimov and Clarke, but Varley's short stories were the first time I encountered science fiction where society is genuinely something completely different than just post-WWII America projected into space. John Varley and Stanislaw Lem changed my worldview completely as a teenager. In my mind they are the two greats of science fiction. I'm also grateful somebody translated and published their books in my small European language.
- jjtheblunt 10mo agoout of curiosity, what language is it (asking from thousands of miles of english and spanish around me, but longing for german and polish and italian)
- nickcw 10mo agoMillennium is one of my favourite books. I happened to see the film recently and here was my review: In the category of time travel romance with end of the world movies this sits near the top. If you've read the book you'll realise that a great deal has been left out, most notably the BC character which is a shame. However the titles said the film (1989) was based off the short story "Air Raid" published 1977 rather than the book "Millennium" published 1983. Anyway, if you can get past the hokey 80s special effects, enough like the book to be enjoyable. If you haven't read the book you probably won't have any idea what is going on despite the characters attempting to explain it to each other as the plot isn't explained well at all!
- e40 10mo agoI loved that book (or did I read the short story? ... don't remember), and the movie was actually OK. Way better than the score on iMDB.
- projektfu 10mo agoI never knew the back story behind Millenium (1989). I was impressed by the concept of the movie but even as a kid I didn't think it quite worked. It is a shame that he wasn't able to get the concept he wanted through to the directors and producers. Now I have another writer to add to my reading list.
- JKCalhoun 10mo agoHis short story, Air Raid is amazing. I wish you had read that first and not seen Millenium. As a film, probably it needed to be 20 minutes long and that was the problem.
- ghaff 10mo agoOutside of the odd anthology series, a film really need to, in general, be at least 90 minutes for commercial viability. The same thing goes on with non-fiction books. Yes, you can have magazine articles but a published book needs to be a good 250 pages.
- NetMageSCW 10mo agoAll Systems Red says “Hi!”.
- dekhn 10mo agoI read pretty much all of Varley's stuff when I was a young teen. I ended up dedicated my career to biotech and machine learning, with the hope that I could achieve some fraction of what was possible in Varley's worlds, only to learn that even basic genetic engineering was taboo at the time (early 1990s to early 2000s) and that hasn't really changed much since.