Quicknation    John Varley

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(born August 9, 1947 in Nederland, Texas) is a science fiction author. He left home before his 20th birthday and arrived in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury just in time for the "Summer of Love", where he worked at various unskilled jobs and panhandled before deciding writing had to be a better way to make a living. He was serendipitously present at Woodstock in 1969 when his car ran out of gas a half-mile away. He also has lived at various times in Portland and Eugene, Oregon, New York, San Francisco again, and Los Angeles.

He has written several novels and numerous short stories, many of them in a future history ("The Eight Worlds") where a century or two before a race of mysterious and omnipotent aliens almost completely eradicated humans from the Earth (they regard whales and dolphins to be the superior Terran lifeforms and humans only an infestation), but humans have inhabited virtually every other corner of the solar system, often through the use of wild biological modifications partially learned from eavesdropping on alien communications. His detailed speculations on the ways humans might use advances in biological science were revelatory in the 1970s when his story collection i was released. The title story in that collection won the Hugo and Nebula awards, and it has been suggested that "Overdrawn at the Memory Bank" may have inspired some portions of the movie Total Recall (although the primary inspiration was clearly the credited source, the Philip K. Dick story "We Can Remember it for you Wholesale").

Varley spent some years in Hollywood but the only tangible result of this stint was the film i 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." (Interview in i, similarities include free societies and free love. Two of his connected novels, Steel Beach and The Golden Globe, posit a sub-society of Heinleiners. The Golden Globe also contains a society evolved from a prison colony on Pluto and a second society evolved from it on Pluto's moon, Charon — a situation most notably found in Heinlein's i. Unlike Heinlein's lunar society, Varley's convict society is a cross between the mafia and the yakuza, only more so. This can be construed as a critique of Heinlein's novel and the ideas within it.

Varley is noteworthy for the frequent prominence of female characters, unusual in science fiction, and especially so among male authors of hard science fiction. This prominence is visible not only in his Eight Worlds history where sex changes are routine, but in his other works as well. The idea of routine sex changes is also an example of the sexual themes that color his works without dominating them.

John Varley has also written a trilogy of novels set in a hollow world reminiscent in structure to a very large Stanford torus space habitat, but with a distinctly different personality. They are:

1976 - Special Locus Award – four novelettes in Top 10 ("Bagatelle", "Gotta Sing, Gotta Dance", "Overdrawn at the Memory Bank", "The Phantom of Kansas")