alt Hacker NewsJohn Varley has died
Comments
> 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.
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!
"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.
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.
> Long, long ago, when I was yet unpublished, I found myself talking with Isaac Asimov at I forget which convention, when John Varley cruised by, trailed by enthusiastic fans.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...
Picnic on Nearside. Highly recommended.
Mammoth and Red Thunder are both masterpieces.
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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.