Books by author: John Varley

I expected this to be somewhat trashy, given that it was part of my summer "trash" list, but it was actually quite good. Varley is a talented short story writer. I rather strongly disliked the only novel I read by him ( Titan), but maybe I'll give him another shot.

I loved John Varley's stories when I read them the first time back in 1996. At the time, I gave his collections Blue Champagne and The Persistence of Vision four-star ratings. My notes from back then are pretty dodgy, so I can't tell you exactly what I found so appealing about his stories, but I can definitely tell you that their appeal has faded somewhat. When I read Varley for the first time, I don't remember being hit over the head by his hippie-dippy free-love viewpoint, but reading this collection, my reaction was shock at how front-and-center and consistent that viewpoint is.

In this collection, I truly liked "Tango Charlie and Foxtrot Romeo", "Good Intentions" (primarily for the obvious secondary reading with George W. as one of the primary characters), and "The Bellman". Most of the other stories are pretty good, but not quite as good as I remembered.

I liked this a lot more than Red Thunder, but it still doesn't live up to Varley's more imaginative short stories. This is a fairly standard time-travel confection with a couple of nice touches in the way the "time machine" works, but Varley happily lives with some of the obvious paradoxes of time travel, and for that reason the novel frustrated me.

A solid time-travel novel by one of my favorite SF authors. His short stories are still his best work, but I'll take what I can get.

This was a fun, light read while I sat around in hotel lobbies and airport terminals. Varley crafts ingenious universes and many of the better elements are cycled through most of his novels and stories. This is the best of his novels that I've read (it's a lot tighter than Steel Beach, but perhaps still not as good as his short stories).

This was Varley's first collection of short stories, and it still stands up. I rather highly recommend all of Varley's short stories, but I've had worse luck with his novels.

If "hard" SF is created when a writer centers a story around plausible technology and real science, then I dub Red Thunder a prime example of "flaccid" SF.

I used to like John Varley a lot, but having recently reread some of his stories in The John Varley Reader, and having suffered through this, his most recent novel, I'm forced to conclude that he really isn't very good. Red Thunder is an implausible mess. Think of the movie "Space Camp", except that instead of accidentally launching the Space Shuttle, the misfit kids instead build a spaceship out of junk and travel to Mars to rescue the crew of a doomed mission. And without the benefit of Kelly Preston and Kate Capshaw.

Bottom line: don't bother.

Varley seems to have a great deal of insight into sexual roles, and his projected attitude is much like mine. I enjoyed Steel Beach much more than Titan, but not nearly as much as Blue Champagne. The novel dragged somewhat in places, and there were one or two extraneous characters (I'm thinking of Fox in particular). For the most part, however, it was very well written. I'm not up-to-date on sf as a genre, so I probably missed many references, but having read Stranger in a Strange Land, I did pick up on a lot of the Heinlein references, notably the character named "Valentine Michael Smith" (with quotes).

Read between train stops on the Red-Line. This book did not grab me, as I was told it might.