John Varley obit

John Varley (1947-2025)

 

He was not on the list.

John Varley (78) died December 10, 2025 in his home in Beaverton Oregon. He had COPD and diabetes.

John Herbert Varley was born August 9, 1947 in Austin TX. He attended Michigan State University. His first novelette, “Picnic on Nearside”, released in 1974, establishing the Eight Worlds universe. He went on to publish about 20 more Eight Worlds works, including his first novel The Opiuchi Hotline (1977), the Anna-Louise Bach detective stories, and the Metal Trilogy. He also wrote the Gaean trilogy, including Titan (1979), Wizard (1980), and Demon (1984), and the four-book Thunder and Lightning series, including Red Thunder (2003), Red Lightning (2006), Rolling Thunder (2008), and Dark Lightning (2014). Standalone novels include Millenium (1983), Mammoth (2005), and Slow Apocalypse (2012). He also wrote many shorter works of fiction featured in magazines such as Analog, F&SF, and Asimov’s, and in other texts such as New Voices III: The Campbell Award Nominees (1980), Year’s Best SF 9 (2004), and The John Varley Reader: Thirty Years of Short Fiction (2004). Titles include “In the Hall of the Martian Kings” (1976), “Air Raid (1977), “Beatnik Bayou” (1980), “A Christmas Story” (2003), and “In Fading Suns and Dying Moons” (2003). Much of his work has been translated into several languages besides English.

Varley was nominated 15 times for a Hugo Award, nine times for a Nebula Award, and 40 times for a Locus Award. Short story “The Pusher” (1981) won Hugo and Locus Awards, and novellas “The Persistence of Vision” (1978) and “PRESS ENTER[]” (1984) both won Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards. Titan (1979), The Barbie Murders (1980), “Blue Champagne” (1981), collection Blue Champagne (1986), and The John Varley Reader all received Locus Awards. He also collected an Endeavour Award, a Prometheus Award, two Seiun Awards, a Jupiter Award, and a Prix Apollo Award, among others and many more nominations. He received the Robert A. Heinlein Award in 2009.

“He was fresh, he was complex, he understood the imaginative implications of transformative developments…” [John Clute]