Now, I actually have a good many of Varley’s short stories in various collections, but you all know I prefer longer fiction, and my hands-down favorite of his longer works is his Gaea trilogy. And not in a ridiculously preachy This Is My Issue way, either it was just something he worked with in his fiction. Here I’m talking about his short fiction mainly, but he did a lot with gender in his novels, too. His exploration of gender was especially cutting edge I mean, his treatment of gender and identity still looks cutting edge today, which is remarkable. He was already writing, in the late seventies and early eighties, SF books that are a perfect fit for today’s SF audience. Varley is still writing, but some of his more recent titles seem to be political thrillers or something, and I am not too interested in that kind of thing, so I haven’t read them. Hah, well, sort of! He deals with big-scale stuff, fairly big scale anyway, but develops his characters a lot more than Robinson and also comes up with pretty cool nonhuman species. Some of his work is like, I don’t know, a cross between Cherryh herself and Kim Stanley Robinson. Most, maybe all of the authors who are Cherryh’s true contemporaries (started writing about the same time, were well-known at least for a time) are even more neglected today than she is, and imo Varley is the one who most ought to be dragged back into the light of day. As pointed out in the comments of the Chanur post, CHANUR’S HOMECOMING is not available in ebook although the others are, which is ridiculous and will hopefully soon be rectified, but if I were you and wanted these in ebook form, I would simply pick that one up used in paper and complete the ebook set later.Īnyway, thinking of CJ Cherryh leads me to John Varley. This is just one story chopped up into three random sections. Yeah, you should definitely, but definitely, not start CHANUR’S VENTURE unless you have both THE KIF STRIKE BACK and CHANUR’S HOMECOMING in your possession. Stealing time from actual projects with deadlines! But I couldn’t help it. Maybe over the weekend I will try to write something coherent about them.Īlso, I must admit I’ve been re-reading the CHANUR series. They are all intense YA contemporaries and it took me a while to get into each one and I ended up loving each one, but, well, still putting my thoughts in order. But I’m not sure yet what to say about them. I actually did read some new-to-me books recently, especially during the Kansas City trip - I got into Melina Marchetta’s backlist: JELLICOE ROAD and SAVING FRANCESCA and THE PIPER’S SON.

Wizard by john varley