John Varley Reappraised

Posted by Colin Harvey May 17, 2009

John Varley dominated SF from 1975 to 1981. He won a Nebula and two Hugos, twenty nominations and about two dozen appearances in the various Year's Best collections. Then he seemed to go away, only intermittently reappearing. Bedazzled by him as a teenager, by my early twenties I'd grown to view Varley as a Heinlein-wannabe of superficial brilliance whose characterization was fairly uniform.

But with 'Retrograde Summer' reprinted in F&SF, it seemed like a good time to make his acqaintance again.

Some stories, like his 1976 'Overdrawn at the Memory Bank' (in which a vacationing office worker becomes trapped in a cybernetic holiday and must survive until his bureaucratically misplaced body can be found) have become almost museum pieces in the light of the faster slicker cyberpunk movement.

The complexity of the Eight Worlds scenario feels contrived, and with its echoes of grooming 'The Pusher' induces a certain queasiness which isn't entirely allayed by the reasons for the narrator's behaviour.

However, 'Options' is a revelation, examining in depth a woman's desire to change sex, and resolving many of the questions arising from reading the Eight World stories.

'Air Raid' is still probably one of the best SF stories of all time, a time-travelling mid-air rescue mission with a relentless pace that only slackens in that despairing last half-page.

Lastly, 'The Persistence of Vision' --in which a traveller stumbles across a commune of the deaf-blind in

remote New Mexico-- has held up better than any other seventies view of the near-future. With its examination of 'disability' from a completely open-minded point of view and one of the great final images in SF, is even better than I remember.

It would be good to see some new fiction from Varley but in the absence of that, there are a handful of stories that are genuine classics.