John Varley, 1947-2025

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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. 

His novel Titan looked to be the opening of a classic trilogy.

Briefly--for almost a decade--John Varley seemed to be the new Robert Heinlein.

And then, alas, he went to Hollywood. 

Hollywood paid him to write, rewrite, and rererewrite a script for Millennium (based on "Air Raid") while five directors came and went. Unsurprisingly, the result pleased nobody--most particularly Varley himself. His novelization of the movie made that abundantly clear. Then, by the man's own testimony, he was paid more and more and more money to write scripts that were never made.

After too long an absence, Varley returned to print. He was every bit as good a writer as he'd ever been. But his ideas were no longer new. In his absence, writers like William Gibson and Neal Stephenson had moved the cutting edge along.

Thereafter, Varley was only a very, very good science fiction writer. It is this person that most of his readers will mourn.

But I will mourn the man who, for a time, seemed to be the resurrection of science fiction, the New Heinlein, the kwisatz haderach of genre. Back then, he set the standard. His were the stories we all wanted to equal and perhaps surpass. He was the reason we read science fiction in the first place.

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.

Above: Photo taken from Worlds Without End. Go here to explore it.

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