El Pusher // Blue Champagne // Tango Charlie y Foxtrot Romeo // Opciones // Xanthia y el agujero negro // La guía telefónica de Manhattan (abreviada) // La palabra no procesada // Pulse Enter

Varley is a wonderful SF writer. This is a collection of stories including The Pusher which won a Hugo in 1981 and Press Enter which won both the Hugo and the Nebula in 1984. ( )

Set in the same universe as The Ophiuchi Hotline, this is a truly stunning collection of short stories. Every single one of these is excellent, and they range in tone from humorous to chilling. Some, like "Blue Champagne," are about humans relating to each other. Others, like "Options" (possibly my favorite) concern gender and (again) how humans relate to each other. And still others, particularly "The Manhattan Phone Book (Abridged)" and "Press Enter" draw you in and then shiv you in the belly. READ IT. ( )

Bach stood at parade rest across the desk from her seated superior and cultivated a detached gaze. I'm only awaiting orders, she told herself. I have no opinions of my own. I'm brimming with information, as any good recruit should be, but I will offer it only when asked, and then I will pour it forth until asked to stop.
That was the theory, anyway. Bach was not good at it. It was her ineptitude at humoring incompetence in superiors that had landed her in this assignment, and put her in contention for the title of oldest living recruit/apprentice in the New Dresden Police Department.

I felt rather short-changed because one of the stories, "Lollipop and the Tar Baby" was also included in his previous collection, "The Barbie Murders" which I read last month and which was originally published 6 years before "Blue Champagne". Apart from that one, the only other story I had read before is the first, "The Pusher". My favourites were "Charlie Tango and Romeo Foxtrot" and "Press Enter" both of which were quite sad stories, and come to think of it, the book as a whole had a sad and poignant tone.

Two of the stories featured Anna-Louise Bach, but they are earlier in her life than in "Bagatelle" and "The Barbie Murders", before she became the police chief of New Dresden on Luna. The Anna-Louise Bach stories and some of the others are set much earlier than the Eight Worlds novels, although according to Wikipedia these pre-invasion stories are not actually part of the Eight Worlds chronology at all, which I hadn't realised. In these stories, Earth has not yet been taken over by the gas-giant beings, and the technology for quick and easy (and reversible) sex-changes and downloading the backed up mind and memories of the dead into newly cloned bodies have not yet been developed so death is still final, and you can’t just get a new body grown for you if you are paralysed in a hang-gliding accident.

Overall, the stories in this collection are sad and poignant, with the only laughs coming from "The Unprocessed Word". This is the satirical tale of an author named John Varley's attempts to engage his editor, publisher and readers in his increasingly crazed struggle against the rise of the word processor. ( )

A collection of John Varley's science fiction stories, published in 1986.

On the whole, I really like Varley. Not all of his stuff is equally good -- his Gaia trilogy, for instance, didn't do a lot for me -- but I very much enjoy his (somewhat loose and disconnected) Eight Worlds universe, which several of the stories in this collection are affiliated with. It's clearly and unashamedly influenced by Robert Heinlein, particularly the often-maligned "late Heinlein" period. But while Heinlein at the height of his free-love-and-libertarianism years could often come across as preachy, obsessive, and even a little skeevy, Varley's depiction of a society completely (and, even by 21st century standards, shockingly) free of sexual restriction or inhibition seems anthropologically interesting, pleasantly matter-of-fact, and blissfully free of any obvious political agenda. His characters are always real people, living a world that's real to them, not mouthpieces for an ideology, and the world-building details of his stories always feel fresh and imaginative. In other words, at least as far as entertainment value goes, he does late Heinlein better than Heinlein ever did.

Those are general comments, though, not necessarily specific to this collection, even if they do apply to at least some of the stories. But I don't have a whole lot else to say about it, other than that it's pretty good. A couple of the stories deal with computer technology and are thus a little bit dated -- the humorous piece about the author's resistance to using a word processor seems downright quaint -- but for the most part, Varley's fiction seems to be aging remarkably well. ( )