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John Varley
Varley in 1992
Born	John Herbert Varley (1947-08-09)August 9, 1947 (age 78) Austin, Texas, U.S.
Occupation	Novelist, short story writer
Alma mater	Michigan State University
Period	1974–present
Genre	Science fiction
Website
varley.net

John Herbert Varley (born August 9, 1947) is an American science fiction writer.

Varley was born inAustin, Texas. He grew up inFort Worth, moved toPort Arthur in 1957, graduated fromNederland High School—all in Texas—and went toMichigan State University on aNational Merit Scholarship. He started as a physics major, switched to English, then left school before his 20th birthday and arrived inHaight-Ashbury district of San Francisco just in time for the "Summer of Love" in 1967. There he worked at various unskilled jobs, depended on St. Anthony's Mission for meals, and panhandled outside the Cala Market on Stanyan Street (since closed) before deciding that writing had to be a better way to make a living. He was serendipitously present atWoodstock in 1969 when his car ran out of gas a half-mile away. He also has lived at various times inPortland andEugene, Oregon, New York City, San Francisco again,Berkeley, and Los Angeles.

Varley has written several novels (his first attempt,Gas Giant, was, he admits, "pretty bad") and numerous short stories, many of them in afuture history,"The Eight Worlds". These stories are set a century or two after a race of mysterious and omnipotent aliens, the Invaders, have almost completely eradicated humans from the Earth (they regard whales and dolphins to be the superior Terran lifeforms and humans only a dangerous infestation). But humans have inhabited virtually every other corner of theSolar System, often through the use of biological modifications learned, in part, byeavesdropping on alien communications.

Varley's "Overdrawn at the Memory Bank" wasadapted and televised for PBS in 1983. In addition, two of his short stories ("Options" and "Blue Champagne") were adapted into episodes of the short-lived 1998 Sci-Fi Channel TV seriesWelcome to Paradox.

Varley spent some years in Hollywood but the only tangible result of this stint was the filmMillennium. Of hisMillennium experience Varley said:

We had the first meeting onMillennium in 1979. I ended up writing it six times. There were four different directors, and each time a new director came in I went over the whole thing with him and rewrote it. Each new director had his own ideas, and sometimes you'd gain something from that, but each time something's always lost in the process, so that by the time it went in front of the cameras, a lot of the vision was lost.^[1]

Varley is often compared^{[by whom?]} toRobert A. Heinlein.^{[citation needed]} In addition to a similarly descriptive writing style, similarities include alibertarian political perspective and advocacy offree love. Two of his connected novels,Steel Beach andThe Golden Globe, include a sub-society of Heinleiners.^{[2][unreliable source?]}The Golden Globe also contains a society evolved from a prison colony onPluto and a second society evolved from it on Pluto's moon,Charon, similar to the situation found in Heinlein'sThe Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. Unlike Heinlein's lunar society, Varley's convict society on Charon maintains its criminal ways and is similar to theMafia or theyakuza. HisThunder and Lightning series plays on his connection with Heinlein by deriving its main characters' names from many of Heinlein's characters, including Jubal, Manuel Garcia, Kelly, Podkayne, Cassie, and Polly, and by frequently dropping titles of Heinlein's novels in the dialogue.

In 2021, Varley announced a series of health problems including a quadruple bypass, COVID-19, and bacterial pneumonia.^[3] Colleagues organized a crowdfunding campaign to pay his expenses while he was unable to write.^[4] At that time he described himself as living nearVancouver, Washington.

• The Persistence of Vision (1978) (UK:In the Hall of the Martian Kings)
• The Barbie Murders (1980) (republished asPicnic on Nearside, 1984)
• Blue Champagne (1986)
• The John Varley Reader: Thirty Years of Short Fiction (2004)
• Good-bye, Robinson Crusoe and Other Stories (2013)

• Millennium—screenplay (1989) based on the short story "Air Raid" (as was the novelMillennium)

Varley has won theHugo Award three times:

• 1979: Novella—"The Persistence of Vision"
• 1982: Short Story—"The Pusher"
• 1985: Novella—"Press Enter■"

and has been nominated a further twelve times.

He has won theNebula Award twice:

• 1979: Novella—" The Persistence of Vision"
• 1985: Novella—"Press Enter■"

and has been nominated a further six times.

He has won theLocus Award ten times:

• 1976: Special Locus Award—four novelettes in Top 10 ("Bagatelle", "Gotta Sing, Gotta Dance", "Overdrawn at the Memory Bank", "The Phantom of Kansas")
• 1979: Novelette—"The Barbie Murders"
• 1979: Novella—"The Persistence of Vision"
• 1979: Single Author Collection—The Persistence of Vision
• 1980: SF Novel—Titan
• 1981: Single Author Collection—The Barbie Murders
• 1982: Novella—"Blue Champagne"
• 1982: Short Story—"The Pusher"
• 1985: Novella—"Press Enter■"
• 1987: Collection—Blue Champagne

Varley has also won theJupiter Award, thePrix Tour-Apollo Award, severalSeiun Awards,Endeavour Award, 2009Robert A. Heinlein Award and others.

Wikiquote has quotations related toJohn Varley.

• Official website
• Interview byClarkesworld Magazine (October 2012)
• John Varley atIMDb
• John Varley at theInternet Speculative Fiction Database
• Review of Varley's "Eight Worlds" stories byJo Walton (March 2010)
• Varley Vade mecum: Bibliography, Gaea Maps (Archived December 17, 2017, at theWayback Machine)

• 1947 births
• Living people
• 20th-century American male writers
• 20th-century American novelists
• 20th-century American short story writers
• 21st-century American male writers
• 21st-century American novelists
• 21st-century American short story writers
• American male novelists
• American male short story writers
• American science fiction writers
• Endeavour Award winners
• Hugo Award–winning writers
• Nebula Award winners
• Novelists from Oregon
• Novelists from Texas
• Writers from Austin, Texas
• Writers from Fort Worth, Texas

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