Back in the 1970s, a new Science Fiction writer appeared with wickedly innovative concepts like switching genders and bodies, and Invaders ousting humanity from the Earth. John Varley, with stories like “Overdrawn at the Memory Bank,” “Press Enter,” “The Barbie Murders,” “The Persistence of Vision,” “In the Hall of the Martian Kings,” and “Air Raid,” broke new ground in SF and for a time was my favorite Science Fiction Writer. You can find these excellent stories in The Persistence of Vision (1978) and The Barbie Murders (1980).
Then Varley went to Hollywood and stopped publishing his incredible stories. Here’s what Varley said about his major Hollywood project, Millennium:
“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.”
When Varley returned to SF writing and publishing in the 1980s, something had changed. The dash and dazzle of Varley’s writing style from the previous decade was gone.
I dutifully read Varley’s 1980s novels, Millennium (1983) and Demon (1984)…but the magic was gone. Over the years, I tried a couple of Varley’s works: Red Thunder (2003) and Red Lightning (2006). Ho-hum.
Irontown Blues (2018) introduces Christopher Bach, a former policeman in one of the largest Lunar cities when the A.I. Lunar Central Computer had a major breakdown. Known as the Big Glitch, the problem turned out to be a larger war than anyone imagined. When order was finally restored, Chris’s life was upended. Now Chris works as a private detective, assisted by his genetically altered dog Sherlock. Varley’s Irontown revisits the hardboiled private eye world with many references to noir books and movies and style.
Chris takes the case of a woman involuntarily infected with an engineered virus. The hunt to track down the biohackers leads Chris to the infamous, dangerous district of Irontown.
All the elements for an entertaining and suspenseful SF novel show up in Irontown, but it all just doesn’t hang together. Something vital is missing. Perhaps this excerpt from LOCUS explains partly what has happened to John Varley:
…So I’m back home now. My final diagnosis, like a slap on the butt as I went out the door, was C.O.P.D. (That’s #5.) It stands for Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. My guess is that it has something to do (ya think?) with over fifty years of a pack-and-a-half per day smoking habit, only recently terminated. Used to be, it was easy to find me at SF conventions. Just look for the very tall guy whose head was obscured by the smoke that encircled his head like a wreath. That was in the early days. More recently I could usually be found outside the hotel, huddled against the rain, the cold, and the howling gale with a couple other hopeless addicts.
I was sent home with a couple bottles of oxygen and an oxygen concentrator, but it’s possible I won’t need them after a while. Lee and I were enrolled in classes at something called the Transitional Care Clinic, TCC, a really smart and nice service of the Clinic where you record all your vital signs and come in weekly for consultation. I hate trailing the coiled tubing for the O2 all around the house, but so be it. I am able to do most things I always did, and get around in the car. I still tire quickly, but I don’t pant like an overheated hound dog.
Thanks again to all who sent money after my heart attack at the beginning of the year. I can’t tell you how much those dollars have helped take a heavy load off both our minds….
Have to agree. Early Varley is great. Most of it collected in the John Varley Reader. And his early novels also were very good Glad I never started smoking. .Then his s output became scarce, mostly lightweight novels that reminded me of Heinlein’s juveniles. Not awful but not very good either, Millennium , based on his short story Air Raid turned out to be awful.
Steve, MILLENNIUM was a huge disappointment. The sojourn to Hollywood derailed Varley’s writing career. He just wasn’t the same writer after that.
To get “Press Enter”, you’d need to add Varley’s third collection, not quite up to THE PERSISTENCE OF VISION but averaging a bit better than THE BARBIE MURDERS, BLUE CHAMPAGNE.
I’d tend to agree with both of you, George and Steve, except that for me “Air Raid” was always a fairly minor story (rather Heinleinian indeed, in its relative divorce from how humans probably would behave under the circumstances), and I quite understood why in the first issue of ASIMOV’S, Varley put his own name to his other story “Goodbye, Robinson Crusoe” and put his one-use (I think) pseudonym “Herb Boehm” on “Air Raid”…and “Air Raid”‘s adaptation into endless screenplay revisions and a minor novel MILLENNIUM was indeed a disappointment (though the AMERICAN PLAYHOUSE adaptation of “Overdrawn at the Memory Bank” was Even Worse. And I didn’t like any of his early novels very much…as opposed to his best novellas on down, they seemed swings and misses at best, aggressively stupid at worst. Hearing about his endless distraction in regard to MILLENNIUM the film helped explain all that back in the ’80s; his being a heavy smoker and the results of that help explain how things have come to unfortunate circumstances since…a career somewhat similar to Damon Knight’s, in some ways, with less sustained brilliant work and more misfortune dogging it.
Todd, health–both physical and mental–impacts writers massively. Two Fridays ago, I reviewed Karl Edward Wagner’s NIGHT WINDS. Wagner is another writer whose alcoholism affected his career.
Artists can get sidetracked on higher averages than most…
If it gives you any idea of how not-very-good the movie version of “Overdrawn at the Memory Bank” is, it was used on an episode of MST3K!
Deb, I remember watching “Overdrawn at the Memory Bank” on PBS decades ago. The production values were abysmal!
And they the least of its problems…Very dumbed down. Game cast, with Raul Julia as protag.
Varley came along in the late 70s when my interest in SF was waning rapidly, and his early work actually revived my interest in the genre for a year or so. But as his work declined so did my revived interest in SF, this time for good.
Michael, Varley burst on the SF scene in the 1970s and looked like he might be a Major Talent. But, sadly, it was Not To Be.
He was…but not one with sustained impact. True of many.
I haven’t read Varley in years, but those early stories…he was running on all cylinders! I couldn’t get enough. Then he changed, or I changed…
(Reminds me of Keith Laumer, another writer whose early works wowed me but whose later writings left me cold.)
I really should read some of Varley’s later works, if only out of loyalty to the impact he had on me back then. Maybe someday…
Jerry, Keith Laumer suffered a stroke that destroyed his writing talent. In Varley’s case, my theory is that that Hollywood stint caused his Talent to slip away.
Yikes! Bummer end. That happened to my aunt too, who never stopped smoking until it was too late, and had to spend the last several years of her life dragging an oxygen tank around with her, never getting a full breath. My father had COPD decades after he stopped smoking, but in the end it turned out to be from the chemicals he inhaled helping out his father in his fur dyeing business, climbing into the vats and cleaning them out. Nevertheless, both my grandfather and my father lived to be 89.
I think I need to read those early short stories rather than this. I had it out of the library a couple of years ago but it just didn’t grab me at all.
Jeff, Steve recommends THE JOHN VARLEY READER so that might be what you’re looking for. I might review Varley’s early short story collections in future FFBs.
That, or the first three collections. “The Persistence of Vision” the novella seemed more Wonderful at 13 yo than it did on adult rereading, to be sure.
Todd, timing is everything. I occasionally reread SF works from my Past and you’re right: some did seem more wonderful at 13 than now.