Varley’s characters change gender as their mood takes them. The Eight Worlds is an example what I have called Protean SF, stories where body form is a matter of fashion and choice.
Varley, in contrast, gave his characters a tool kit that allowed them to live comfortably in a wide variety of challenging environments and a history that ensured that they had no choice but to make their homes across the Solar System. This inspired a lot of authors to drop interplanetary settings for interstellar. Interplanetary probes had relayed a lot of doleful information about the true nature of the other worlds in the Solar System. This short story provides a nice example of what made Varley stand out. Large corporations have no sense of humour. Varley ran into something similar when he wrote a murder mystery featuring cultists popularly known as Barbies. There’s an obvious way to draw the killer out: Fox could flaunt themself as bait and hope that they will be luckier than their previous iterations.…Īs I recall Disney was maximum displeased when Varley used their corporate name as a generic term. The police aren’t having much luck running the killer to ground. Brain tapes and clones make death a momentary inconvenience but still, each murder costs Fox months or years of personal experience. However, like the Black Death, the Invasion left its marks on the society that emerged from the wreckage.įox, the protagonist of this story, is an Environmentalist, someone who shapes the weather and ecology of the disneys, vast habitats built under the surface of worlds like the Moon and Mars, Fox’s personal life is disrupted when an unknown enemy starts assassinating him. By the time in which the Eight Worlds stories are set (or to be more exact, when most of them are set), that trauma was as distant a memory as the Black Death is for us. Only the handful of people living in space retained high technology - which was not enough to avert a struggle to survive, as their colonies had never been intended to be self-sufficient. Centuries before, aliens had shut down all technology on Earth, dooming billions. The Eight Worlds was one of Varley’s two out-of-the-box settings. (I myself take no sides in that argument between talented visionaries and the opposing alliance of timid reactionaries and untalented hacks.) Varley was seen by some as the source of good old reliable hard science fiction, but he did ring changes on gender and sex that would have been unthinkable fifteen years earlier. The 1960s had seen an often heated conflict between the New Wave and more traditional authors. This essay provides a useful context for reading young Varley. Introduction (The Persistence of Vision) Įxactly what it says on the tin. To quote a noted social activist, “Why are so few of us left active, healthy, and without personality disorders?” The mature Varley wastes his talent on second-rate Heinlein pastiches 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.
#John varley the persistence of vision series
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. The tragedy is the stark contrast between the John Varley of the 1970s and the John Varley of today. 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.
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