STOP THE PRESSES—EXTRA—EXTRA—EXTRA—John Varley At Work On IRONTOWN BLUES

Dateline July 11, 2015

After John Varley's most recent disappointing effort on DARK LIGHTNING (DL) we came to the conclusion that either Varley had lost his love for Science Fiction and just can't write in the genre anymore, or that someone had stolen his identity and had written the book forging his name. Neither Rick nor I could finish DL! And we tried. Oh how we tried. I managed to get 90 pages into the book before bailing. The main characters in a sort of dysfunctional homage to Heinlein, were space-faring, beautiful, athletic, and at the center of the action. Unfortunately, they are not at all likable.  They are so annoying insufferable as to be intolerable. I could not stand another minute of their story. Rick was even ore determined to finish DL. He spent an excruciating two months trying to continue the book before he punched-out, at only the 60 page mark. We anguished over the uncomfortable fact that there may now be a Varley book that we had not finished. But there it is: the book is unreadable. We choose to remember Varley for his successes, not his recent failures.

We don't know for sure just what happened to DL but it does not have the Varley touch that distinguishes the vast majority of his oeuvre from the more mundane efforts of other SF writers. The high mark of Varley's writing are the Gaean Trilogy and the Eight Worlds series. Varley's Eight Worlds has memory recording, biological sex-changing, and body swapping in its suite of society changing technologies. Varley wrote twenty short stories in the Eight Worlds with THE OPHIUCHI HOTLINE as the capstone novel. Later he revisited it with the first two novels of a proposed trilogy.

 The trilogy was conceived as a thematic trio with professional characters counterpoised to give a multifaceted view of his vision of the futureand all with a different metal in the title. This was to be Varley's "Metal" trilogy. The first novel of this trilogy, STEEL BEACH, featured a reporter. The second, THE GOLDEN GLOBE, published in 1998, had an actor as the protagonist. And the third proposed novel was to be about a cop. Its title was to be IRONTOWN BLUES. Reporter, actor and cop. Apparently Varley was stuck on the cop story because he published six other novels since 1998, one of which, MAMMOTH, ranks among his very best work. So now after a seventeen year hiatus Varley has announced that his is returning to his Eight Worlds stomping ground and is working on IRONTOWN BLUES!

This is such amazing news that I am already clearing my calendar for a re-read of all the Eight Worlds series in preparation for what I fully expect to be a great novel. Let's hope that Varley has gotten his grove back and that his return to the Eight Worlds indicates a return to the story telling greatness that made John Varley such an important author in our development.


Here is the press release from Varley.net:

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IRONTOWN BLUES

It's six years after I was included on io9's list of 12 Unfinished SF Novels We Wish We Could Read, and I am finally at work on IRONTOWN BLUES! I hope to have it finished by the end of the year, and it should see print sometime in 2016.

July 11, 2015
Vancouver, WA