Seven suburban misfits are constructing a spaceship out of old tanker cars. The plan is to beat the Chinese to Mars--in under four days at three million miles an hour. It would be history in the making if it didn't sound so insane.
Mammoth opens with one of the best teases, well, ever. It's evocative, exciting, and incredibly promising. And maybe it's the way these things always go, but I found the unspooling of that tease incredibly unsatisfying. Varley is working here on solid, unimaginative genre ground; a mid-level Greg...
Fleeing Earth after an alien invasion, the human race stands on the threshold of evolution, like a fish cast on artificial shores. Their new home is Luna, a moon colony blessed with creature comforts, prolonged lifespans, digital memories, and instant sex changes. But the people of Luna are bored...
I review all three books here (Titan, Wizard and Demon).Ah, Varley, what am I to do with you?First and foremost, this trilogy is highly enjoyable, if quirky and eccentric in some places. Varley has a strong sense of how people work and his wisdom in his understanding of human interaction plays w...
It is incredibly difficult to write. Moreover, it's damn near impossible to write well. With that said, I really tried to enjoy Millenium but in the end it just didn't work for me. It's too bad because the premise is creative. Hell, I even enjoyed the movie with Kris Kristofferson and Cheryl Ladd...
When I first began to read Varley's future history, I didn't realize something that comes through very clearly here: the society as described is based on mass murder. The process of memory recording is not murder (yet). It becomes so when clone bodies are 'grown', and then not allowed to devel...
Having reviewed the first of this series (Red Thunder) and being pretty impressed, I quickly moved on to the second of John’s books in this series.As I had hoped, this is an interesting novel with many of the pleasing attributes of the first. It is, in simple terms, Red Thunder: the Next Generati...
זמורה ביתן, 1987, 267 ע"מתשעה סיפורים קצרים המתרחשים בעולמות רחוקים ושונים. לכל סיפור יש פואנטה שמדגימה את ההבנה העמוקה שנמצאת מעבר לקיום הנוכחי.רוח רפאים מקנזס - מה קורה כאשר הרוצח וקורבנו נפגשים. פוקס, אומנית סיבתנית, נרצחת וחוזרת לחיים 3 פעמים. בפעם הרביעית היא מתכננת להביס את רוצחה בכל מחיר.פ...
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 col...
Lieutenant Patricia Kelly Elizabeth Strickland-otherwise known as Podkayne-is a third-generation Martian. Her grandfather, Manny, was one of the first men to set foot on Mars. So Poddy has some planet-sized shoes to fill. That's why she's joined the Music, Arts, and Drama Division of the Martian ...
A collection of short stories from the Hugo and Nebula award-winning author who "has the imagination of six ordinary science fiction writers" (George R.R. Martin)—John Varley.Picnic on Nearside includes nine astonishing stories from an author whose imagination has changed the genre and the way th...
I stopped and waited. It was a sort of converted mining engine, the sort that pulls loads of coal up from the bottom of shafts. It was= battery-powered, and it had gotten quite close before I heard, it. A small man was driving it. He was pulling a car behind - him and singing as loud as he could ...
“Avast below!” I called out, and Papa stood to the side as I kicked the rope ladder over the side of the terrace. Polly carried the box to the table inside as Papa clambered up. I held out a hand to help him, but he didn’t need it. He gave me a big hug, and I felt good in his powerful arms. ...