VARLEY, John (Herbert)

(1947-)

   US writer who entered the sf field with "Picnic on Nearside" for FSF in 1974 and who was soon thought to be the most significant new writer of the 1970s. He was fresh, he was complex, he understood the imaginative implications of transformative developments like cloning (CLONES), many of his protagonists were women, and most of the stories he told were set within an overall background Universe whose centre of geography had been startlingly displaced - in a manner characteristic of the finest sf - from Earth itself. It may have been the case that many previous SPACE OPERAS,especially those claiming galactic scope, were set far from the home planet (which was often "forgotten"), but JV's innovation was twofold: to bring the displacement close to the present day, which NEAR FUTURE setting made it more vivid, and to present a subsequent Solar System whose own complexity seemed to mark a genuine evolutionary shift - in fictional terms - from the old geocentricity. The image of an incessantly humming Solar System - it is central to books like Michael SWANWICK's VacuumFlowers (1987) - owes as much to JV as it does to the idioms of CYBERPUNK. Urgent and risk-taking, the stories assembled in THE PERSISTENCE OF VISION (coll 1978; vt In the Hall of the Martian Kings 1978 UK) and The Barbie Murders (coll 1980; vt Picnic on Nearside 1984) seemed to announce the shape of sf's response to the end of the 20th century. JV's shorter works have brought him 3 HUGOS - for "The Persistence of Vision" in 1979, "The Pusher" in 1982 and PRESS ENTER (1984 IASFM; 1990 chap dos) in 1985 - and2 NEBULAS - for "The Persistence of Vision" and "PRESS ENTER".This sense of currency was also a feature of JV's first - and perhaps finest - novel, THE OPHIUCHI HOTLINE (1977), set 500 years into his future HISTORY - it issometimes called the Eight Worlds sequence - at a time when humanity has been long exiled from Earth by immensely superior, indifferent "Invaders". Bioengineered and variously cloned, humans now subscribe to social andsexual codes - and live within perspectives and according to processes - that differ radically from those of their flesh-bound, planet-bound ancestors. The protagonist is in fact several successive clones of the same person, the original dying only a few pages into the text and new versions of that original - clone bodies with pre-recorded mind-tapes of the original plugged in at the point of arousal - taking over when needed. The sense of ongoing process - and of an identity-dissolving taste formetamorphosis - is incessant. The eponymous hotline, which is operated by similarly displaced interstellar exiles, beams data through the Solar System, the last item being a message that humanity will soon be bannedfrom its home system, and will be doomed to wander the stars, homeless, for ever. This happens.JV then composed the Titan or Gaean sequence - Titan (1979), Wizard (1980) and Demon (1984) - which begins exuberantlywith a mission to explore the largest satellite of Saturn. But Titan turns out to be a sentient artifact (or BIG DUMB OBJECT) called Gaea and to contain within its entrails a veritable POCKET UNIVERSE of trapped individuals and species. The female protagonist of the series becomes Gaea's agent, intimate and enemy. Although this was technically aninterminable template, the series was kept decorously to trilogy length, but did not fully escape the charge that the libidinous solipsisms of the plot had a VIRTUAL-REALITY resonance. Millennium (1977 IASFM as "Air Raid" as by Herb Boehm; exp 1983) - filmed as MILLENNIUM (1989) - is a TIME-TRAVEL novel in which humans from a devastated future extractcontemporary accident victims at the moment before their deaths because, being still genetically whole, they can be used in a project to repopulate the Earth, with the aid of an AI. Like JV's best work, the book was smoothly muscled, manipulative and ruthless. His output of the 1980s was, nevertheless, less strikingly innovative than had been hoped - and, perhaps unfairly, expected - of him. The stories assembled in Blue Champagne (coll 1986) - Tango Charlie and Foxtrot Romeo (1989 chap)reprints an original story from the collection - show no technical decline but lack some of the exploratory dangerousness of his first work. Similarly, Steel Beach (1992) demonstrates through its huge length avirtuoso control of sf themes, presented through many of the kind of compulsive narrative hooks employed by Robert A. HEINLEIN in his ruthless prime; but the story itself, set in the Eight Worlds universe about 200 years after humanity's expulsion from Earth, lacks dramatic urgency, despite many cleverly conceived (but sidebar) episodes full of action. The title itself, however, may well become established as a tag for the evolutionary impasse humanity may soon face: like a lungfish struggling to breathe on a Pacific beach, JV suggests, humanity could soon find itself struggling for breath on the steel beach that is all the home it has, after the final death of Nature.

   JC

   See also: BLACK HOLES; CHILDREN IN SF; ESCHATOLOGY; ESP; FANTASY; GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION; GENETIC ENGINEERING; ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE; LINGUISTICS; The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION ; MAGIC; MARS; NEW WAVE; OUTER PLANETS; PASTORAL; SCIENCE FANTASY; SEX; SPACE HABITATS; TIME PARADOXES; WRITERS OF THE FUTURE CONTEST.