James Nicoll Reviews

Wizard is the middle volume in John Varley’s near-future Gaea Trilogy. In stark contrast to industry practice, the trilogy consists of exactly three novels.

Chris Minor and Robin the Nine-Fingered both have genetic diseases that, while quite different, may have the same cure. All the Earthman and spacewoman need do is appeal to God and pray for mercy. Or rather, appeal to a god: Gaea, a 1,300-km diameter living, intelligent torus orbiting Saturn. Having complete command of matters biological — at least within the torus — altering genes is a trivial task for the ancient being.

Convincing Gaea to perform a cure will be trickier.

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John Varley’s 1980 The Barbie Murders (later re-published as Picnic on Nearside) is a collection of science fiction stories. Most but not all of them are set in Varley’s Eight Worlds milieu. 

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1979’s Titan is the first novel in John Varley’s Gaea trilogy.

Ringmaster is the first crewed spacecraft to visit distant Saturn. The crew discovers a twelfth moon of Saturn, the first discovered in the six decades since Janus and Epimethius were detected in the 1960s¹. What at first appears to be a small object turns out to be huge, over 1300 kilometres in diameter^2. By rights, any moon that large should be spherical and comparable in mass to our Moon. This object, which the astronauts initially call Themis, is a torus of low mass which is spinning rapidly enough that any object on its surface would be flicked off into space. The obvious conclusion is that the object is artificial, possibly an alien generation ship. 

When Ringmaster approaches the object, they discover something else about Themis. It knows that Ringmaster is nearby and is able to reach out and tear the spacecraft apart. The crew — Cirocco Jones, Bill NLN, April and August Polo, Gaby Plauget, Calvin Greene, and Gene Springfield — are grabbed by immense tentacles and borne off into the depths of the vast moon.

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1977’s The Ophiuchi Hotline was John Varley’s first novel. 

Convicted of crimes against humanity, Lilo’s fate is set. She will be executed as thoroughly as the state can arrange: her genetic samples will be destroyed, her brain records erased, and her body will be dropped into one of the small black holes ¹ that power the Eight Worlds. 

All this will come to pass, but it won’t be the end of Lilo’s story. 

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The tragedy of John Varley’s 1978 collection, The Persistence of Vision, isn’t that its contents have aged; although time has not been kind to some of them, others have fared well. The tragedy is the stark contrast between the John Varley of the 1970s and the John Varley of today. Young Varley was one of the few male authors of note to emerge in the disco era, the author of a remarkable series of short works [1]. The mature Varley wastes his talent on second-rate Heinlein pastiches [2] and novels whose moral is that, as bad as the collapse of civilization would be, at least it would turn women back into homemakers and get the kids off the Twitter. 

To quote a noted social activist, ​“Why are so few of us left active, healthy, and without personality disorders?”

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