Somebody was commenting on Goodreads about how my Top 20 sf shelf is missing John Varley books (among other allegedly missing books). This reminds me that I did read Varley's Gaea books and Millennium decades ago. I can't remember much about them, but I do remember really liking them.
Any John Varley fans?
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Old guy here~~> revisiting the SF of my youth & finally found hard copies of Titan, Wizard, & Demon. I had found a handful of voices online rejecting out of hand a couple old Boomers lamenting Varley’s current obscurity after being highly thought of “back in the day”.
The general consensus was that his writing just doesn’t hold up.
I’m about 80 pps in to the first book, & I just don’t buy that as a justification for the fading of appreciation.
So three questions:
the general, generational disconnect between potential audiences of today discovering SF authors of the 20thC~~> how much is this driven by the rise to prominence of audiobooks vs text? How much by the overwhelming of science-y fiction by horror & fantasy genres? How much by the shift of filmed SF from B Movie to mainstream, so that if an author’s work hasn’t been filmed, reading audiences never discover them?
Would also benefit from any opinions about Varley, & if anyone knows if he had any interest from Hollywood. I remember Harlan Ellison was once asked, maybe in the 90’s, which writers Hollywood had most missed the boat on & Varley was at the top of a very short list.
So far I have only read the first book in the trilogy; Titan. And there is actually a sandworm in the novel, and possibly the sequels too.
Spoiler for those who intend to read the book:
It's not just a giant worm that happens to have similarities with Frank Herbert's worms, it is a direct copy of it. The gigantic structure in space is controlled by an alien intelligence, and in an attempt to learn more about and prepare for human contact, it picks up radio and TV-transmissions from earth, including pop culture. One of these things are Frank Herbert's Dune, and so it decides to replicate it and create a sandworm on its own. But at least in the first novel, it's not really an encounter, just a sight and a reference. Still, just found it interesting.
Book was interesting, movie was terrible, but the key elements is the same. You cannot harm a timeline if you do actions before everyone dies anyway. I wonder if any of the writers have mentioned the source of this tactic.
What a great find! I hadn't seen much talk about this book on Reddit so I wasn’t expecting much from it, but I was blown away. It was a quick read, fun, endlessly creative, with a bit of a mind-boggling ending. Without spoiling too much, the book has a wonderfully creative story-telling structure related to clones that I wasn't expecting but I found really engaging.
I was also really impressed with Varley’s writing and how well this book has aged since 1977. So far in my experience 70s sci-fi books by white guys typically have awful female characters, if any, with annoyingly limited imaginations when it comes to future social aspects of humanity (I've heard referred to as "galactic suburbia"). Varley was refreshingly modern in those aspects, with great characters of all genders and a believable future society where gender and sexuality is quite fluid. None of that was really the focus of the book though, it was just great world building.
Highly recommend this book to you all. I will definitely be checking out more of his novels, probably Titan next.
So I just read Varley's The Golden Globe, and I was pretty much floored. Can anyone tell me what to read next from him?
Titan was nominated for Hugo & Nebula awards in the late 70's, and has a strong (for it's interpretation at the time) female lead. I read it when it came out, and what I liked about it was Varley's attempt to introduce a variety of different nonhuman psychologies. I found his world to be engaging and his creations within to be foriegn, which i liked. Anywho, i did a seach and didn't find anything in this reddit referring to Varley's Titan and thought I would drop a recommendation here. If you're into alien new world discovery with some self discovery tossed in, I would recommend it. It is a series, but the first book stands on it's own very well.
If you have not read them, I highly recommend both Air Raid and the novel Millennium. Air Raid is a tight story that, as Varley put it when it was optioned for a motion picture, would have made a good episode of The Twilight Zone.
The novel expands on the story, developing the future crap sack earth of several thousand humans slowly going extinct in the ruins of several civilizations, and alternating with the air crash investigation in the present.
The movie falls short of kinda OK.
I'm thinking of making a campaign based in Gaea but I've never made a campaign before so I'd love some suggestions if anyone has done it before.
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