John Varley (09 August 1947–10 December 2025) was a popular and influential novelist and short story writer with four decades of work across science fiction genres and mediums.
Born in Texas, Varley studied physics and then English in Michigan, then left for San Francisco, where he spent the Summer of ’67. After moving to New York, he decided in 1971 to become a science-fiction writer. He went on to live and work in various locations in the West and Southwest, including ten years in Hollywood, until retiring to the Pacific Northwest.
The Science Fiction scene was drawn to Varley’s work throughout the 1970s. Expanding twentieth century themes of human destruction, exploration, and exile, with concepts such as identity as commodity, he influenced many of today’s established genre themes, such as cyber enhancement and bioengineering. Much of Varley’s writing was set in his Eight Worlds, a setting more than a century after humans were almost entirely driven from Earth to live in other parts of the solar system.
Varley’s writing was adapted for television and film four times in the 1980s and 1990s, starting with “Overdrawn at the Memory Bank” in 1983. He continued to write and publish, expanding also into Young Adult titles, through his 2012 novel, Slow Apocalypse. His work won multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards, along several other prominent genre awards, and was often translated into many languages. He was the 2009 recipient of the Robert A. Heinlein Award.
Author Michael Swanwick notes, “John Varley appeared out of nowhere with story after story filled with ideas absolutely new to science fiction. We—readers, writers, all of us—were dazzled. He seemed to us the second coming of Robert Heinlein: And save for a soul-destroying stint in Hollywood, scripting movies that never got made, he might have been exactly that. Even diminished, however, he was one of the greats. He moved science fiction forward, and we remain in his debt.”
John Varley lived 78 years.