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John Varley (author)
John Herbert Varley (August 9, 1947 – December 10, 2025) was an American science fiction writer who won Hugo and Nebula awards for his novellas "The Persistence of Vision", "PRESS ENTER ■", and "The Pusher".
Varley was born in Austin, Texas, on August 9, 1947. He grew up in Fort Worth, moved to Port Arthur in 1957, graduated from Nederland High School—all in Texas—and went to Michigan State University on a National Merit Scholarship. He started as a physics major, switched to English, then left school before his 20th birthday and arrived in the Haight-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 at Woodstock in 1969 when his car ran out of gas a half-mile away. He also lived at various times in Portland and Eugene, Oregon, New York City, San Francisco again, Berkeley, and Los Angeles.
He wrote several novels (his first attempt, Gas Giant, was, he admitted, "pretty bad") and numerous short stories, many of them in a future 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 the Solar System, often through the use of biological modifications learned, in part, by eavesdropping on alien communications.
Varley's "Overdrawn at the Memory Bank" was adapted 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 series Welcome to Paradox.
Varley spent some years in Hollywood but the only tangible result of this stint was the film Millennium. Of his Millennium experience Varley said:
We had the first meeting on Millennium 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.
Varley's work was compared to that of Robert A. Heinlein by the Canadian SF critic, editor, and author John Clute.
In 2021, Varley announced a series of health problems including a quadruple bypass, COVID-19, and bacterial pneumonia. Colleagues organized a crowdfunding campaign to pay his expenses while he was unable to write. At that time he described himself as living near Vancouver, Washington.
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John Varley (author)
John Herbert Varley (August 9, 1947 – December 10, 2025) was an American science fiction writer who won Hugo and Nebula awards for his novellas "The Persistence of Vision", "PRESS ENTER ■", and "The Pusher".
Varley was born in Austin, Texas, on August 9, 1947. He grew up in Fort Worth, moved to Port Arthur in 1957, graduated from Nederland High School—all in Texas—and went to Michigan State University on a National Merit Scholarship. He started as a physics major, switched to English, then left school before his 20th birthday and arrived in the Haight-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 at Woodstock in 1969 when his car ran out of gas a half-mile away. He also lived at various times in Portland and Eugene, Oregon, New York City, San Francisco again, Berkeley, and Los Angeles.
He wrote several novels (his first attempt, Gas Giant, was, he admitted, "pretty bad") and numerous short stories, many of them in a future 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 the Solar System, often through the use of biological modifications learned, in part, by eavesdropping on alien communications.
Varley's "Overdrawn at the Memory Bank" was adapted 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 series Welcome to Paradox.
Varley spent some years in Hollywood but the only tangible result of this stint was the film Millennium. Of his Millennium experience Varley said:
We had the first meeting on Millennium 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.
Varley's work was compared to that of Robert A. Heinlein by the Canadian SF critic, editor, and author John Clute.
In 2021, Varley announced a series of health problems including a quadruple bypass, COVID-19, and bacterial pneumonia. Colleagues organized a crowdfunding campaign to pay his expenses while he was unable to write. At that time he described himself as living near Vancouver, Washington.