I had the opportunity to pay a little tribute to my very favorite writer, the science fiction master John Varley, in Discourse. This month also marks the 50th anniversary of his first publication, and I spend a little time examining his career and some of the elements that make his work so special: his hippie-style individualism and the smooth, precise style of his prose. Here’s an excerpt:
Varley’s fiction is marked by radical inventiveness, yet the qualities that make his work truly extraordinary are the smoothness of his prose and the realism of his characters. Together, these suspend the reader’s disbelief even through the strangest premises, in a manner that indeed resembles Heinlein, but without Heinlein’s distracting penchant for preaching about his political and social fixations. Actually, Varley’s writing more resembles that of hard-boiled detective writers like Donald Westlake….
Varley’s trademarks [are] independent, clever characters guided by common sense instead of conformity, and more likely to build rockets in their garages than to complain about others not doing so. Above all, his characters often see exploring the unknown not just as an adventure, but as a path to the authentic, individual life—one that won’t be clean or easy, but will be earned, and therefore genuine, in a way that can never be true of the unexamined life that computerized mass production makes so cheap. It’s a theme that would have been familiar to Emerson, who wrote: “The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle.”
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