John Varley died two days ago on December 10, 2025. A great many will mourn him as a science fiction writer whose work they enjoyed. But this misses his moment.
In the mid-1970s, Varley exploded into science fiction like a phoenix. His "Eight Worlds" stories were set in a future where hyper-powerful aliens have killed everyone on Earth as a threat to its whales and porpoises and humanity survives everywhere else in the Solar System. Despite this bleak background, the stories were bright and inventive. People change gender on a whim. Wealthy and glorious cities turn to shacks and hovels when their holographic fronts are turned off at night. People bank their memories so that, upon death, they can be restarted with new memories. He wrote so many major stories per year that, in a resurrection of an old pulp-days practice, some had to be published under a pseudonym.
We were all dazzled. His work was full of impressive new ideas. And, outside of the Eight Worlds sequence, he wrote things like "In the Hall of the Martian Kings," which resurrected the possibility of intelligent life on Mars after the Mariner probes had apparently disproved that. Or "Air Raid," which made air travel terrifying again. [...]
Long, long ago, when I was yet unpublished, I found myself talking with Isaac Asimov at I forget which convention, when John Varley cruised by, trailed by enthusiastic fans. Asimov gazed sadly after him and said, "Look at him. A decade ago, everybody was asking, 'Who is John Varley?' A decade from now, everybody will be asking, 'Who is Isaac Asimov?'"
And that was John Varley's moment.
There are a lot of books and authors that I loved as a kid that, in hindsight, are not as good as I remembered. But John Varley is not one of those; he remains one of my favorite authors. I read Overdrawn at the Memory Bank in a second-hand "Best SF of the year" compilation when I was 10 years old and my head exploded. I read everything of his I could get my hands on after that. His vision of the future wasn't just robots and spaceships but it was optimistic and romantic about what we could become in a way I hadn't seen before.
I am sad to report that almost all of his work appears to be out of print! The pickings on bookshop.org are slim. When evangelizing him to people I always recommend The John Varley Reader as a great place to start. That one is widely available on eBay. So go buy that. Go. Do it now.
Which reminds me that one time in the 90s I loaned a friend my copy of the already-out-of-print-even-then Blue Champagne and they immediately lost it. I was so mad. This was before Amazon and eBay, but I eventually found some early online bookstore and ordered myself a new copy. When it arrived it turned out to be a signed first edition! So I was less mad then.
His Eight Worlds stories from the 70s and 80s are my favorites. Decades later, he returned to them with Steel Beach, which is his riff on Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, but slaps Heinlein around almost as much as Verhoeven did in Starship Troopers.
BERLIJN (ANP/RTR) - De gesprekken in Berlijn tussen Oekraïense en Amerikaanse functionarissen over voorstellen voor een oplossing van de oorlog in Oekraïne zijn zondag na meer dan vijf uur afgerond en worden maandag hervat. "De gesprekken duurden meer dan vijf uur en zijn voor vandaag beëindigd met de afspraak om morgenochtend verder te gaan", zei Dmytro Lytvyn, adviseur van president Volodymyr Zelensky.
De Oekraïense en Amerikaanse delegatie spreken elkaar in Berlijn in een vergaderruimte van de kanselarij, met de veiligheidsadviseur van kanselier Friedrich Merz als gespreksleider.
Het is nog onduidelijk in welke vorm de beraadslagingen tussen de Amerikaanse vertegenwoordigers en de Oekraïners maandag worden voortgezet. Zelensky geeft pas commentaar als de gesprekken maandag zijn afgerond, aldus Lytvyn.
Photo Caption: Special forces are positioned on the roof of the chancellory in Berlin, Germany, Sunday, Dec. 14, 2025. (AP Photo/Maryam Majd)
Het belangrijkste nieuws dit weekend was natuurlijk niet MvdP, AjaFey, het prutswerk van Joran van der Sloot en/of Nederlandse kaas uit België, maar natuurlijk Zelensky die het NAVO-lidmaatschap in een loopgraaf gooit in aanloop naar het topoverleg in Berlijn morgen. (Was dat nou zo moeilijk? Antwoord: ja). En nu krijgen we dus morgen in Berlijn: VREDE. Dat is toch schitterend mensen. Een einde aan het Slavische Slachthuis. Nooit meer stomme drone-filmpjes met dode mensen (die keken we al niet meer), ontploffende energiecentrales en/of ballistische raketten in het zwerk. 135.000 Oekraïners die terug naar Oekraïne kunnen, zonnebloemolie weer betaalbaar, MH17-klootzakken uitgeleverd, Russen die weer voetbalclubs kopen en nooit meer Koblenko en YevgeniDinges aan de talkshowtafels! De wereld is mooi. Bonusvideo: Ware Fin ziet het rooskleurig in & drukt zich diplomatiek uit.
SocialDaarom nu muziek. KEES!
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