Reviews: Varley, John

No father, no mother, she’s just like the other

The Ophiuchi Hotline — John Varley

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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30 Oct 2016 / 0 Comments

Because My Tears Are Delicious To You

The tragedy of John Varley

The Persistence of Vision — John Varley

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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5 Jul 2015 / 0 Comments

Because My Tears Are Delicious To You