alt Hacker News> 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.
Replies
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 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.
> 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.
> 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.