John Varley Books in Order

Set on Venus, this early story uses an offworld trip to ask what people value, and what they are willing to pay for it. The result is intimate science fiction with a sharp moral edge.

Far out in space, a small black hole threatens an outpost and everyone working there. Varley turns the cosmic danger into a tense, personal story about labor, loneliness, and survival at the edge of the system.

Time travelers need healthy people to rebuild humanity, so they target passengers on planes doomed to crash. Varley packs that grim premise into a tight, fast story that later grew into Millennium.

This UK edition of The Persistence of Vision collects Varley's early standout stories, from Mars and Mercury to deep space. It's a smart place to sample his short fiction and the big ideas that shaped his later books.

A brush with a black hole bends more than physics in this eerie, idea-driven tale. Varley turns a deep-space setup into a story about warped reality, isolation, and the strange company you can find out there.

Centuries after aliens drove humanity from Earth, people survive across the solar system with help from mysterious transmissions called the Hotline. Then the messages stop being a gift and become a demand, and geneticist Lilo must face the bill.

This award-winning collection gathers some of Varley's best early stories, including tales of Mars, time travel, black holes, and altered bodies. It's a strong entry point for readers who want the breadth of his short fiction.

When the starship Ringmaster investigates a strange object near Saturn, Captain Cirocco Jones and her crew find a giant living world hidden inside it. What begins as exploration becomes a trek through a bizarre realm ruled by the unpredictable Gaea.

Cirocco Jones is now the Wizard of Gaea, with power, scars, and plenty to fear from the being she serves. As unrest grows across the living world, she has to decide whether survival means obedience or rebellion.

Two young people on Luna step out into a wider world and discover that growing up may mean changing more than they expected. It's an early Varley story, compact, wistful, and full of lunar atmosphere.

In a culture that makes radical body change almost casual, the pressure to fit in can turn deadly. Varley uses a murder mystery to explore identity, beauty, and how conformity mutates in the future.

In a world where time doesn't pass evenly for everyone, love becomes a scheduling problem as much as an emotional one. Varley uses that science fiction twist to tell a sharp, bittersweet relationship story.

After a midair collision over California, an air-disaster investigator uncovers evidence that should be impossible. The answer reaches into the far future, where time travelers are stealing doomed passengers for a desperate reason of their own.

Gaea has gone mad and kidnapped the son of Robin, the witch who once challenged her. Cirocco Jones and her allies head back into the living world for a final confrontation with a godlike enemy that never plays fair.

Victor Apfel inherits more than he expected after a neighbor's apparent suicide. Teaming up with computer expert Lisa Foo, he follows a trail of hacking and hidden power into a chilling story about technology, surveillance, and who is really watching whom.

A very short story with a long aftertaste, this one imagines how much history and danger can hide inside a city full of names. It lands as a quiet, cold shock.

Police chief Anna-Louise Bach is pulled into a rescue mission when signs of life appear aboard a quarantined, decaying space station. Saving the child inside means facing old plagues, failing systems, and impossible choices.

A man wakes to the same day again and again, trapped in a life that resets before memory can settle. The story starts playful, then turns sad and unsettling as the pattern's real purpose comes into view.

On Luna, reporter Hildy Johnson lives in a society where bodies can be remade and almost every need is met. But beneath the comfort lies mass depression, computer unease, and a mystery that turns Hildy's personal crisis into something much larger.

Varley takes the Superman origin story, drops it into Stalinist Russia, and lets the political consequences run wild. The result is an alternate-history satire that's funny, bleak, and pointed.

Actor, con man, and shape-changing performer Sparky Valentine drifts through the outer solar system carrying Shakespeare and trouble in equal measure. A chance at a major production on Luna sends him racing home while enemies close in from every side.

Starting from the old question of where the aliens are, Varley answers with a bleak sense of scale. It's a later story about first contact, cosmic silence, and the possibility that absence is the warning.

With China poised to reach Mars first, seven Florida misfits build a homemade spaceship from tanker cars and nerve. Their wild plan is not just to beat the competition, but to rescue a stranded crew and prove the old space dream still works.

Set on Varley's lunar frontier, this later novelette begins like a police case and opens into something larger. Quiet dread and a widening sense of consequence give it a thoughtful, eerie pull.

This career-spanning collection offers eighteen stories, including five new ones, each with a brief autobiographical introduction by Varley. It's one of the best single-volume ways to sample his range, from Eight Worlds tales to stand-alone experiments.

Eccentric billionaire Howard Christian wants to clone a mammoth, and the project starts as bold science with impossible ambitions. Then a physicist and an elephant expert are thrown into a time-travel mess that turns the experiment into a survival story.

Ray Garcia-Strickland hates life on tourist-packed Mars until a mysterious impact devastates Earth. Forced back into the crisis, he and his family are drawn into another big scientific gamble and a puzzle with planetary consequences.

Third-generation Martian Podkayne joins the Martian Navy expecting music, travel, and a family legacy to live up to. Her posting to Europa brings danger, politics, and the kind of adventure that makes growing up happen fast.

A scientist's petroleum-eating virus slips loose and begins collapsing the oil economy, then the world around it. In Los Angeles, screenwriter Dave Marshall has just enough warning to try getting his family out before disaster turns personal.

This later collection brings together eleven previously uncollected or hard-to-find stories and novellas. It ranges across Varley's solar system settings, mixing dark jokes, big science fiction ideas, and some of his strangest side roads.

Cassie and Polly, identical twin descendants of Mars pioneers, are halfway to another star aboard the starship Rolling Thunder when their father says the mission must stop. Suddenly the girls are at the center of a crisis that could decide the future of interstellar travel.

On a future Luna, ex-cop Christopher Bach works as a private detective with his altered dog, Sherlock. When a client is infected with an engineered virus, the case pulls him into Irontown's biohacker underworld and a threat that could spread far beyond one city.