This is one of the more fascinating things about Varley's world.
Unlike today's primitive surgical and hormone treatments, they had a much more elegant solution. You would have a new body of the opposite sex grown in a tank, and when it was ready, a medico would remove your brain from your old body and place it into your new body.
So instead of being in a medical approximation of your new gender, you really were that gender, with your old brain and all your memories intact.
It was so commonplace that people may change back and forth many times. You might ask a friend in casual conversation, "When did you have your first Change?"
A "medico" was something like what we would call a "doctor" today, but they were not considered nearly as highly skilled and highly paid. Basically a mechanic for your brain and body.
> So instead of being in a medical approximation of your new gender, you really were that gender, with your old brain and all your memories intact.
This implicates the brain and experience being genderless, which does not really seem to pass by today's understanding of it. But then again, the brain would probably also experience a very traumatic phase of body-adaption. There are many syndromes with people having strange feelings about the body they were born in, or missing parts of it; how awful would be to switch the whole body overnight and not having a long phase of adapting to it. Not sure if I would really call this elegant. But then again, body switching is quite common in SciFi, and those aspects are usually completely ignored.
Not explaining something is not the same as ignoring it. You can't really explain technology which doesn't exist without risking getting it completely wrong as actual science moves along, or just harming the narrative by focusing on irrelevant details.
If a society has advanced medical technology where changing your body is not just possible but broadly available, then it follows that they have solved any issues with rejection and adaptation. Nanobots constantly tweaking hormones? Your mind and memories simply layered over a virgin clone brain with everything set for whichever sex that body has?
If the writer set out to explore that theme they might delve into it, otherwise all that matters is that it works and sounds plausible from within the context of the story.
Scifi is about 'what if?' and how that affects people. 'What if money could buy a body of the opposite gender?' is all that is relevant.
Similarly, we don't need to know how the huge space station capable of destroying a whole planet in a single shot works (unless you are a rebel princess), just that it does.
> ... , then it follows that they have solved any issues with rejection and adaptation.
We have solved the issue to travel fast from A to B (by car, train, etc), yet we haven't solved motion sickness. There are treatments, sure, but the underlying issue hasn't been solved.
> Not explaining something is not the same as ignoring it.
No, that's pretty much the definition of it.
> If a society has advanced medical technology where changing your body is not just possible but broadly available, then it follows that they have solved any issues with rejection and adaptation.
No, that is just explaining away poor writing. Explaining necessary details makes the difference between good or bad storytelling.
> Scifi is about 'what if?' and how that affects people.
Starting with ignoring the first obvious consequences is not exploring how something affects people, it's just wishful thinking.
> Similarly, we don't need to know how the huge space station capable of destroying a whole planet in a single shot works (unless you are a rebel princess), just that it does.
If Star Wars would be SciFi, then we should get some good enough explanation for this. People are disputing about those details to great lengths for good reasons.
> Explaining necessary details makes the difference between good or bad storytelling.
Only when the details you are explaining are relevant to the story you want to tell and the themes you want to cover.
In The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin explores a planet populated by an offshoot of humans who have developed a genderless existence where they experience sexual characteristics only once a month and are genderless the rest of the time.
The book does not explain how this works biologically or why this came about evolutionarily, because that is not the point. The interest of the author was to explore the cultural and sociological implications of this situation. If a group of humans lived without gender most of the time, how would this affect their culture and society? And what does that in turn say about our own gendered society?
Diving into the biological nitty-gritty of this fictional scenario would distract from the social themes the author was trying to explore.
There were probably a few more sentences hand waving these sorts of details in the books, by the time they got mentioned you were probably more interested in worrying about the Moon-wide epidemic of suicide that the Moon’s governing AI had tasked the book’s protagonist with discovering the cause with, after the protagonist recovered from being brought back in a fresh clone after succumbing to it.
That’s the plot of Steel Beach, if you want to go see what happens next and how much time Varley actually spent on the details of this stuff.
> body switching is quite common in SciFi, and those aspects are usually completely ignored.
I think it was Fredrik Pohl in Man Plus who got that part better sorted out - of course your body/physical experience shapes your brain.
One of the Oliver Sacks stories (I know, his stock crashed recently) was about a man who had lost his vision as a toddler, and had it restored in midlife. Which tripped him badly.
I wonder if that was some inspiration for Iain M Banks' Culture series, in which citizens are able to change their sex at will over the course of about a year. Banks wrote specifically about what this signified for civilisation:
> A society in which it is so easy to change sex will rapidly find out if it is treating one gender better than the other; within the population, over time, there will gradually be greater and greater numbers of the sex it is more rewarding to be, and so pressure for change - within society rather than the individuals - will presumably therefore build up until some form of sexual equality and hence numerical parity is established.
The Culture books started being published in the 80's and Varley was writing short stories about how sex changes that were fast, cheap and easy would effect societal gender roles in the 70's.
The notion that the same individual could both father children as a male and bear children as a female was indeed trippy in the 70's.
Also the concept of being able to back up your mind and restore it into a clone of yourself (as an adult or a child), or even into the body of an animal as a sort of tourist experience.
Mind-computer interfaces that connected you to the AI that ran the planet, or could be used as a phone...
There were quite a few interesting ideas in his works that would change societies.
This is one of the things I like most about his writing. In the scifi-whodunnit The Barbie Murders the concept of changing your body without too much trouble is used by a cult of people who all look exactly the same — lack of genitalia (i.e., 'Barbie'-like) included.
Varley wrote very much like Heinlein, but with the edgier parts of libertarianism shaved off.
Anyone looking for recommendations for reading Varley would do well to pick up some short story collections like The Persistence of Vision, The Barbie Murders, or Blue Champagne.
For a solid trilogy I can recommend the Gaea Trilogy (Titan, Wizard, and Demon), but that includes a lot of (fun!) cultural references which may be a tad harder on readers under 40.
His Eight Worlds books are great fun to read too. Pick up The Ophiuchi Hotline and see what you think to get a feel for those. These can be read independently of each other.
For young adults and anyone looking to read some scifi not quite as heavy and more reminiscent of Heinlein's juveniles, the Thunder and Lightning four book series is quite entertaining. One prescient social development he predicted there is that for an event you weren't present at to be believable (like something shown in a news broadcast or viral video) you would want a friend or a friend-of-a-friend to confirm it. If nobody was actually there, it was probably fake.
Demon has some interesting additions to the ongoing “Gaea fucks with Scirocco” relationship but is mostly about Gaea getting senile and watching too many old 1950s movies. Varley was clearly enjoying writing the latter part but it dragged for me.
Titan introduced the setting and went through different parts of Gaea. Wizard summarized the basics of this, if you want more details of what happened to Scirocco’s whole crew then they are in there.
I found it pretty good as a standalone book, but what stuck me the most was this random interaction:
I picked it up at a library discount sale, where they give you shopping bags and you can fill them up for a flat 10USD each. I was browsing and some old guy just walked by me and commented "oh YOU FOUND WIZARD! That's a good one" me- "I haven't read it before" him- "Oh if you like scifi you're in for a treat."
...But yes if the other two books are along the same lines, I might try going through the whole trilogy again, just... in order this time.
> In the scifi-whodunnit The Barbie Murders the concept of changing your body without too much trouble is used by a cult of people who all look exactly the same — lack of genitalia (i.e., 'Barbie'-like) included.
Did you see the Barbie movie? I bet you will enjoy it.
There is a scene where Ken and Barbie are rollerblading in Venice Beach, and some rude people are harassing them. They each announce, "I don't have a ..." (You can fill in the blank.)
And without giving too much away, there is another scene near the end that involves... Birkenstocks!
At thirteen or fourteen, I was lucky enough to read "The Persistence of Vision" in a science fiction collection published by Orbis at such an affordable price that I could buy every volume with my weekly allowance.
The stories had a powerful impact on me, because at that age concepts like the normalization of sex change or living a full life while being deaf-blind didn't fit into my mental frameworks. I enjoyed it from beginning to end, each and every one of the stories.
Two months ago (almost forty years later) my mother found the old book in our family library, and I've been able to reread it, enjoying it as much or more than the first time. I remembered the general plot of all the stories perfectly, which is proof of their intrinsic quality, and we can clearly see their influence on later authors like my beloved Doctorow.
The most curious thing is that some perspectives have shocked me again. Not the sex change, of course. Not raising children in a commune (whether on Earth or Mars). But sex between adults and minors is a topic that I'm sure makes me more uncomfortable now than when I was a kid.
So, for the second time, I can only be grateful to the author for giving me a good time without condescension or fear of presenting societies different from my own. For making me think. And feel.
I'd read the American classics like Asimov and Clarke, but Varley's short stories were the first time I encountered science fiction where society is genuinely something completely different than just post-WWII America projected into space.
John Varley and Stanislaw Lem changed my worldview completely as a teenager. In my mind they are the two greats of science fiction. I'm also grateful somebody translated and published their books in my small European language.
I had a city college teacher who knew I liked sci-fi, so she printed me out the short story Equinoctial. Great little story, and from there I devoured everything by him.
The relatively recent Irontown Blues reminded me how great the Eight Worlds is, and how entertaining he is.
I picked it up one day with the intent to just read the first paragraph to see what it was about. 3-4 hours letter I had finished the book without realising.
Very good story. Published at about the same time as Vernor Vinge's True Names, which while quite different explored some of the same proto-Internet themes.
Millennium is one of my favourite books. I happened to see the film recently and here was my review:
In the category of time travel romance with end of the world movies this sits near the top.
If you've read the book you'll realise that a great deal has been left out, most notably the BC character which is a shame. However the titles said the film (1989) was based off the short story "Air Raid" published 1977 rather than the book "Millennium" published 1983.
Anyway, if you can get past the hokey 80s special effects, enough like the book to be enjoyable.
If you haven't read the book you probably won't have any idea what is going on despite the characters attempting to explain it to each other as the plot isn't explained well at all!
I read pretty much all of Varley's stuff when I was a young teen. I ended up dedicated my career to biotech and machine learning, with the hope that I could achieve some fraction of what was possible in Varley's worlds, only to learn that even basic genetic engineering was taboo at the time (early 1990s to early 2000s) and that hasn't really changed much since.
> Long, long ago, when I was yet unpublished, I found myself talking with Isaac Asimov at I forget which convention, when John Varley cruised by, trailed by enthusiastic fans. Asimov gazed sadly after him and said, "Look at him. A decade ago, everybody was asking, 'Who is John Varley?' A decade from now, everybody will be asking, 'Who is Isaac Asimov?'"
I never met him -- he hated travel, and I never could afford to go to a US convention -- but from all I've read, no, the absolute opposite was the case.
I never knew the back story behind Millenium (1989). I was impressed by the concept of the movie but even as a kid I didn't think it quite worked. It is a shame that he wasn't able to get the concept he wanted through to the directors and producers. Now I have another writer to add to my reading list.
> People change gender on a whim.
This is one of the more fascinating things about Varley's world.
Unlike today's primitive surgical and hormone treatments, they had a much more elegant solution. You would have a new body of the opposite sex grown in a tank, and when it was ready, a medico would remove your brain from your old body and place it into your new body.
So instead of being in a medical approximation of your new gender, you really were that gender, with your old brain and all your memories intact.
It was so commonplace that people may change back and forth many times. You might ask a friend in casual conversation, "When did you have your first Change?"
A "medico" was something like what we would call a "doctor" today, but they were not considered nearly as highly skilled and highly paid. Basically a mechanic for your brain and body.
> So instead of being in a medical approximation of your new gender, you really were that gender, with your old brain and all your memories intact.
This implicates the brain and experience being genderless, which does not really seem to pass by today's understanding of it. But then again, the brain would probably also experience a very traumatic phase of body-adaption. There are many syndromes with people having strange feelings about the body they were born in, or missing parts of it; how awful would be to switch the whole body overnight and not having a long phase of adapting to it. Not sure if I would really call this elegant. But then again, body switching is quite common in SciFi, and those aspects are usually completely ignored.
Not explaining something is not the same as ignoring it. You can't really explain technology which doesn't exist without risking getting it completely wrong as actual science moves along, or just harming the narrative by focusing on irrelevant details.
If a society has advanced medical technology where changing your body is not just possible but broadly available, then it follows that they have solved any issues with rejection and adaptation. Nanobots constantly tweaking hormones? Your mind and memories simply layered over a virgin clone brain with everything set for whichever sex that body has?
If the writer set out to explore that theme they might delve into it, otherwise all that matters is that it works and sounds plausible from within the context of the story.
Scifi is about 'what if?' and how that affects people. 'What if money could buy a body of the opposite gender?' is all that is relevant.
Similarly, we don't need to know how the huge space station capable of destroying a whole planet in a single shot works (unless you are a rebel princess), just that it does.
> ... , then it follows that they have solved any issues with rejection and adaptation.
We have solved the issue to travel fast from A to B (by car, train, etc), yet we haven't solved motion sickness. There are treatments, sure, but the underlying issue hasn't been solved.
> Not explaining something is not the same as ignoring it.
No, that's pretty much the definition of it.
> If a society has advanced medical technology where changing your body is not just possible but broadly available, then it follows that they have solved any issues with rejection and adaptation.
No, that is just explaining away poor writing. Explaining necessary details makes the difference between good or bad storytelling.
> Scifi is about 'what if?' and how that affects people.
Starting with ignoring the first obvious consequences is not exploring how something affects people, it's just wishful thinking.
> Similarly, we don't need to know how the huge space station capable of destroying a whole planet in a single shot works (unless you are a rebel princess), just that it does.
If Star Wars would be SciFi, then we should get some good enough explanation for this. People are disputing about those details to great lengths for good reasons.
> Explaining necessary details makes the difference between good or bad storytelling.
Only when the details you are explaining are relevant to the story you want to tell and the themes you want to cover.
In The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin explores a planet populated by an offshoot of humans who have developed a genderless existence where they experience sexual characteristics only once a month and are genderless the rest of the time.
The book does not explain how this works biologically or why this came about evolutionarily, because that is not the point. The interest of the author was to explore the cultural and sociological implications of this situation. If a group of humans lived without gender most of the time, how would this affect their culture and society? And what does that in turn say about our own gendered society?
Diving into the biological nitty-gritty of this fictional scenario would distract from the social themes the author was trying to explore.
There were probably a few more sentences hand waving these sorts of details in the books, by the time they got mentioned you were probably more interested in worrying about the Moon-wide epidemic of suicide that the Moon’s governing AI had tasked the book’s protagonist with discovering the cause with, after the protagonist recovered from being brought back in a fresh clone after succumbing to it.
That’s the plot of Steel Beach, if you want to go see what happens next and how much time Varley actually spent on the details of this stuff.
> body switching is quite common in SciFi, and those aspects are usually completely ignored.
I think it was Fredrik Pohl in Man Plus who got that part better sorted out - of course your body/physical experience shapes your brain.
One of the Oliver Sacks stories (I know, his stock crashed recently) was about a man who had lost his vision as a toddler, and had it restored in midlife. Which tripped him badly.
[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_Plus , https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1993/05/10/to-see-and-not... ]
I wonder if that was some inspiration for Iain M Banks' Culture series, in which citizens are able to change their sex at will over the course of about a year. Banks wrote specifically about what this signified for civilisation:
> A society in which it is so easy to change sex will rapidly find out if it is treating one gender better than the other; within the population, over time, there will gradually be greater and greater numbers of the sex it is more rewarding to be, and so pressure for change - within society rather than the individuals - will presumably therefore build up until some form of sexual equality and hence numerical parity is established.
http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm
I imagine so.
The Culture books started being published in the 80's and Varley was writing short stories about how sex changes that were fast, cheap and easy would effect societal gender roles in the 70's.
The notion that the same individual could both father children as a male and bear children as a female was indeed trippy in the 70's.
Also the concept of being able to back up your mind and restore it into a clone of yourself (as an adult or a child), or even into the body of an animal as a sort of tourist experience.
Mind-computer interfaces that connected you to the AI that ran the planet, or could be used as a phone...
There were quite a few interesting ideas in his works that would change societies.
This is one of the things I like most about his writing. In the scifi-whodunnit The Barbie Murders the concept of changing your body without too much trouble is used by a cult of people who all look exactly the same — lack of genitalia (i.e., 'Barbie'-like) included.
Varley wrote very much like Heinlein, but with the edgier parts of libertarianism shaved off.
Anyone looking for recommendations for reading Varley would do well to pick up some short story collections like The Persistence of Vision, The Barbie Murders, or Blue Champagne.
For a solid trilogy I can recommend the Gaea Trilogy (Titan, Wizard, and Demon), but that includes a lot of (fun!) cultural references which may be a tad harder on readers under 40.
His Eight Worlds books are great fun to read too. Pick up The Ophiuchi Hotline and see what you think to get a feel for those. These can be read independently of each other.
For young adults and anyone looking to read some scifi not quite as heavy and more reminiscent of Heinlein's juveniles, the Thunder and Lightning four book series is quite entertaining. One prescient social development he predicted there is that for an event you weren't present at to be believable (like something shown in a news broadcast or viral video) you would want a friend or a friend-of-a-friend to confirm it. If nobody was actually there, it was probably fake.
>For a solid trilogy I can recommend the Gaea Trilogy (Titan, Wizard, and Demon),
I only read Wizard, how much am I missing out on the other two?
Demon has some interesting additions to the ongoing “Gaea fucks with Scirocco” relationship but is mostly about Gaea getting senile and watching too many old 1950s movies. Varley was clearly enjoying writing the latter part but it dragged for me.
Titan introduced the setting and went through different parts of Gaea. Wizard summarized the basics of this, if you want more details of what happened to Scirocco’s whole crew then they are in there.
Strictly speaking, the beginning and the end of the whole saga. :)
I found the whole trilogy enjoyable, and quite unique. If you enjoyed Wizard, pick up the other two and (re)read the whole trilogy.
I found it pretty good as a standalone book, but what stuck me the most was this random interaction: I picked it up at a library discount sale, where they give you shopping bags and you can fill them up for a flat 10USD each. I was browsing and some old guy just walked by me and commented "oh YOU FOUND WIZARD! That's a good one" me- "I haven't read it before" him- "Oh if you like scifi you're in for a treat."
...But yes if the other two books are along the same lines, I might try going through the whole trilogy again, just... in order this time.
They are all three radical changes in story, but solidly entrenched in the same principal characters and worldview. It's a very satisfying trilogy.
> In the scifi-whodunnit The Barbie Murders the concept of changing your body without too much trouble is used by a cult of people who all look exactly the same — lack of genitalia (i.e., 'Barbie'-like) included.
Did you see the Barbie movie? I bet you will enjoy it.
There is a scene where Ken and Barbie are rollerblading in Venice Beach, and some rude people are harassing them. They each announce, "I don't have a ..." (You can fill in the blank.)
And without giving too much away, there is another scene near the end that involves... Birkenstocks!
> So instead of being in a medical approximation of your new gender, you really were that gender, with your old brain and all your memories intact.
A contradiction in terms.
At thirteen or fourteen, I was lucky enough to read "The Persistence of Vision" in a science fiction collection published by Orbis at such an affordable price that I could buy every volume with my weekly allowance.
The stories had a powerful impact on me, because at that age concepts like the normalization of sex change or living a full life while being deaf-blind didn't fit into my mental frameworks. I enjoyed it from beginning to end, each and every one of the stories.
Two months ago (almost forty years later) my mother found the old book in our family library, and I've been able to reread it, enjoying it as much or more than the first time. I remembered the general plot of all the stories perfectly, which is proof of their intrinsic quality, and we can clearly see their influence on later authors like my beloved Doctorow.
The most curious thing is that some perspectives have shocked me again. Not the sex change, of course. Not raising children in a commune (whether on Earth or Mars). But sex between adults and minors is a topic that I'm sure makes me more uncomfortable now than when I was a kid.
So, for the second time, I can only be grateful to the author for giving me a good time without condescension or fear of presenting societies different from my own. For making me think. And feel.
I had the same experience at age 13.
I'd read the American classics like Asimov and Clarke, but Varley's short stories were the first time I encountered science fiction where society is genuinely something completely different than just post-WWII America projected into space.
John Varley and Stanislaw Lem changed my worldview completely as a teenager. In my mind they are the two greats of science fiction. I'm also grateful somebody translated and published their books in my small European language.
I had a city college teacher who knew I liked sci-fi, so she printed me out the short story Equinoctial. Great little story, and from there I devoured everything by him.
The relatively recent Irontown Blues reminded me how great the Eight Worlds is, and how entertaining he is.
out of curiosity, what language is it (asking from thousands of miles of english and spanish around me, but longing for german and polish and italian)
Finnish. We had a good selection of translated literature.
As someone who read The Persistence of Vision at almost the same age, I concur, it was transformative.
"Press [ENTER]" is one of my favourite books.
I picked it up one day with the intent to just read the first paragraph to see what it was about. 3-4 hours letter I had finished the book without realising.
This happened again, twice. Such a good book.
May he rest in peace.
Novella actually :-)
Very good story. Published at about the same time as Vernor Vinge's True Names, which while quite different explored some of the same proto-Internet themes.
Wouldn’t reading the synopsis be a better way of discovering what a book is about than buying it and reading the first paragraph?
As my case has demonstrated, the answer is a resounding "no" :)
Wow so passive-agressive.
Millennium is one of my favourite books. I happened to see the film recently and here was my review:
In the category of time travel romance with end of the world movies this sits near the top.
If you've read the book you'll realise that a great deal has been left out, most notably the BC character which is a shame. However the titles said the film (1989) was based off the short story "Air Raid" published 1977 rather than the book "Millennium" published 1983.
Anyway, if you can get past the hokey 80s special effects, enough like the book to be enjoyable.
If you haven't read the book you probably won't have any idea what is going on despite the characters attempting to explain it to each other as the plot isn't explained well at all!
I read pretty much all of Varley's stuff when I was a young teen. I ended up dedicated my career to biotech and machine learning, with the hope that I could achieve some fraction of what was possible in Varley's worlds, only to learn that even basic genetic engineering was taboo at the time (early 1990s to early 2000s) and that hasn't really changed much since.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Varley_(author)
https://varley.net/
> Long, long ago, when I was yet unpublished, I found myself talking with Isaac Asimov at I forget which convention, when John Varley cruised by, trailed by enthusiastic fans. Asimov gazed sadly after him and said, "Look at him. A decade ago, everybody was asking, 'Who is John Varley?' A decade from now, everybody will be asking, 'Who is Isaac Asimov?'"
Asimov seems to have been a very modest man...
> Asimov seems to have been a very modest man...
I never met him -- he hated travel, and I never could afford to go to a US convention -- but from all I've read, no, the absolute opposite was the case.
I never knew the back story behind Millenium (1989). I was impressed by the concept of the movie but even as a kid I didn't think it quite worked. It is a shame that he wasn't able to get the concept he wanted through to the directors and producers. Now I have another writer to add to my reading list.
His short story, Air Raid is amazing. I wish you had read that first and not seen Millenium.
As a film, probably it needed to be 20 minutes long and that was the problem.
Outside of the odd anthology series, a film really need to, in general, be at least 90 minutes for commercial viability.
The same thing goes on with non-fiction books. Yes, you can have magazine articles but a published book needs to be a good 250 pages.
All Systems Red says “Hi!”.
Steel Beach and Golden Globe are both great books.
Also the Titan trilogy.
Picnic on Nearside. Highly recommended.
Mammoth and Red Thunder are both masterpieces.