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John Varley

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John Varley in 1992

John Herbert Varley (born August 9, 1947, in Austin, Texas) is an American science fiction author.

Quotes

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  • "In five years, the penis will be obsolete," said the salesman.
  • I thought his lack of curiosity must be monumental, but I was wrong. It turned out that he had some queer notions about the morality of the whole process, ideas he had gotten from some weirdly aberrant religion in his childhood. I had heard of the cult, as you can hardly avoid it if you know any history. It had said little about ethics, being more interested in arbitrary regulations.
    • "Picnic on Nearside", in Peter Crowther ed. Tales in Space, p. 286
  • It’s unpleasant to find that what you had thought of as moral scruples suddenly seem not quite so important in the face of a stack of money.
  • There were worlds in the jewel. There was ancient Barsoom of my childhood fairy tales; there was Middle Earth with brooding castles and sentient forests. The jewel was a window on something unimaginable, a place where there were no questions and no emotions but a vast awareness.
  • Just because Beethoven doesn’t sound like currently popular art doesn’t mean his music is worthless.
    • "The Phantom of Kansas" (1976), The World Treasury of Science Fiction (ed. David Hartwell), p. 375
  • She was already putting her distance between herself and this woman she would kill. She was becoming an object, something she was going to do something unpleasant to; not a person with a right to live.
    • "Equinoctial" (1977), The Arbor House Treasury of Great Science Fiction Short Novels, p. 84
  • They were testing ways whereby people didn't have to live in Chicago. It was a wonder to me. I had thought Chicago was inevitable, like diarrhea.
    • "The Persistence of Vision"
  • They understood the basic principles of morals: that nothing is moral always, and anything is moral under the right circumstances.
    • "The Persistence of Vision", The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (March 1978), reprinted as the title story in The Persistence of Vision (1978)
  • They had a good picture of the world as it is, not the rosy misconceptions so many other utopians labor under. They did the jobs that needed doing.
    • "The Persistence of Vision"
  • What they had going certainly came as near as anyone ever has in this imperfect world to a sane, rational way for people to exist without warfare and with a minimum of politics. In the end, those two old dinosaurs are the only ways humans have yet discovered to be social animals. Yes, I do see war as a way of living with one another; by imposing your will on another in terms so unmistakable that the opponent has to either knuckle under to you, die, or beat your brains out. And if that’s a solution to anything, I'd rather live without solutions. Politics is not much better. The only thing going for it is that it occasionally succeeds in substituting talk for fists.
    • "The Persistence of Vision"
  • Why is it that once having decided what I must do, I'm afraid to reexamine my decision? Maybe because the original decision cost me so much that I didn’t want to go through it again.
    • "The Persistence of Vision"
  • I didn't become rich, but I was usually comfortable. That is a social disease, the symptom of which is the ability to ignore it while your society develops weeping pustules and has its brains eaten out by radioactive maggots.
    • "The Persistence of Vision"
  • There was something at the core of the world of business that refused to adjust to children in the board room, while appearing to make every effort to accommodate the working mother.
  • Buildings were just the world's furniture, and he didn't care how it was arranged.
    • "The Pusher", The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (October 1981), reprinted in The John Varley Reader (2005)
  • I had kept a straight face under worse provocation, so I trust I did well enough then.
    • "Press Enter", Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine (May 1984)
  • She looked at me askance. “Of course I bribed him, Victor. You’d be amazed to know how cheaply. Does that bother you?”
    “Yes,” I admitted. “I don’t like bribery.”
    “I’m indifferent to it. It happens, like gravity. It may not be admirable, but it gets things done.”
    • "Press Enter"
  • I am vehemently anti-religion. That is, organized religion. I despise them all. I try to despise them equally, but lately Islam has shot to the top of my hate list, for obvious reasons. I don’t give a shit what they do in their own squalid little dictatorships, but they seem to want to export “Submission” to the whole world, and they are willing to kill the likes of Salman Rushdie and those Danish cartoonists for insulting Islam. They are basically living somewhere around the 8th Century, and I often wish I had a time machine to send them back there. (Yes, I know there are moderates. So why don’t they do something about the zealots?) So when I mention religion at all in my stories, the practitioners are usually doing something nutty. About as nutty as praying five times a day facing Mecca, saying a rosary, handling deadly snakes, or speaking in tongues.
  • Religion and science don’t mix well, as science likes to observe and draw conclusions—to learn, in other words—and religion cares only about learning the Bible, the Torah, the Koran, etc. They don’t need to learn about this world, because they already know. A good way to describe a wasted life, as far as I’m concerned. Religious people already know things, with no more proof than some words in an old book. In short, they’re crazy.

The Ophiuchi Hotline (1977)

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All page numbers from the mass market edition published by Ace Books in October 1993, ISBN 0-441-63484-2, first printing
  • But now she was fifty-seven, and suddenly ancient. Soon she would be dead. Dead. You can’t get any more ancient than that.
    • Chapter 1 (p. 4)
  • This was a killer. Quite possibly a soldier, though Lilo was not expert in mental diseases.
    • Chapter 2 (p. 23)
  • She was a reader; there were many citizens who were not. The prevailing social explanation for illiteracy was that there were people who were temperamentally unsuited for reading—and indeed there were few callings in a computerized, video-saturated world that required literacy. Lilo accepted that, but had always had a feeling that most people never learned to read because they simply were not smart enough.
    • Chapter 5 (p. 49)
  • If only she could convince them, perhaps she could convince herself.
    • Chapter 10 (p. 89)
  • It was not pleasant to admit what one is willing to do to go on living.
    • Chapter 14 (p. 141)
  • We’ve become a race of engineers. What we never seem to understand is that after it’s time to railroad, there’s time to build a beautiful railroad. The state of the art has advanced enough; we can afford to pay a small penalty in efficiency.
    • Chapter 17 (p. 167)
  • You've got to watch yourself when you get as old as I am. You have to try new things, sometimes for no better reason than that they’re new. Otherwise you rust.
    • Chapter 18 (p. 170)
  • I found that it is much more pleasurable to read adventures than to live them.
    • Chapter 23 (p. 210)

Millennium (1983)

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All page numbers from the mass market edition published by Berkley Books in May 1985, ISBN 0-425-09843-5, 4th printing
Italics as in the book
  • There’s always a way to work out your problems if you’re only take a look at them and then do what needs to be done.
    For instance, when I found that three mornings in a row I had shut off my new alarm and gone back to sleep, I put the switch in the kitchen and tied it in to the coffee-maker. When you’re up and have the coffee perking, it’s too late to go back to sleep.
    • Chapter 1, “A Sound of Thunder” (p. 4)
  • Like plugging into life-support equipment, I view apologizing as a dangerous vice that can take over your whole life if you give in to it.
    • Chapter 2, “All You Zombies—” (p. 29)
  • Time travel is so dangerous it makes H-bombs seem like perfectly safe gifts for children and imbeciles. I mean, what’s the worst that can happen with a nuclear weapon? A few million people die: trivial. With time travel we can destroy the whole universe, or so the theory goes. No one has been anxious to test it.
    • Chapter 4, “The Time Machine” (p. 51)
  • News is, by definition, bad news.
    • Chapter 4, “The Time Machine” (p. 52)
  • I sat on the bed and read the Gideon Bible until the food came. That Gideon sure had a weird sense of humor. Try “The Book of Genesis.”
    • Chapter 4, “The Time Machine” (p. 62)
  • The parking lot was full of cars belonging to relatives, and one news truck from a local television station.
    “Easy, Bill,” Tom said, and guided me gently away from the camera crew. “You don’t want to wind up on the six o’clock news. Not that way.”
    “I hope there’s a hell, Tom. And when those guys get there, I hope the devil’s waiting to shove a camera in their faces and ask them what they feel like.”
    • Chapter 5, “Famous Last Words” (pp. 72-73)
  • You can define heroism any way you want to, but that’s it for me. It’s sticking in there no matter what. Whether it’s a pilot fighting his plane down through that last mile, or switchboard operators and doctors and nurses staying at their posts while the bombs blitz London, or even the dance band on the Titanic playing while the ship goes down…
    It’s fulfilling your responsibilities.
    • Chapter 5, “Famous Last Words” (p. 80)
  • We speak of the rigid framework of events, but the fact is there is some leeway. Apparently things tend to happen the way they should happen, according to whatever plan was dictated by whoever’s in charge of this stinking universe. Changes, if they are minor, correct themselves in ways no one understands but which tend to make a hash of anybody’s theory of free will.
    • Chapter 6, “As Never Was” (pp. 89-90)
  • I don’t have much truck with romantic notions of human destiny, or Gods, or Good Guys winning out in the end. I have seen destiny in action, and I can tell you, it stinks.
    • Chapter 6, “As Never Was” (p. 97)
  • Predestination is the ugliest word in any human language.
    • Chapter 8, “Me, Myself, and I” (p. 113)
  • Computers, contrary to what you may have been told, are not smart. They’re just fast. They can be programmed to act smart, but then it’s the programmer who’s actually smart and not the computer. If you give a computer long enough to chew on a problem it will usually solve it. And since a long time to a computer is about a millionth of a second, they give the illusion of being smart.
    • Chapter 9, “The Shadow Girl” (p. 121)
  • “Don’t be such a pessimist.”
    “All time travelers are pessimists.”
    • Chapter 10, “The Man Who Came Early” (p. 131)
  • Me, I don’t know if I was born a pessimist or had pessimism thrust upon me. What I do you know is that I’ve had ample reason to embrace the philosophy.
    • Chapter 10, “The Man Who Came Early” (p. 131)
  • The nice thing about being a pessimist is that bittersweet is an improvement.
    • Chapter 11, “Behold the Man” (p. 141)
  • Sherman looked surprised as an infallible Pope holding a losing ticket at the racetrack.
    • Chapter 11, “Behold the Man” (p. 141)
  • We were in the middle of a festival known as Christmas, which seem to take up the whole month of December. There was a big tree decorated with lights, and various other decorations hung around the buildings. Christmas was a time for spending money, traveling, and getting drunk. It had originally been a celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ, but by the 1980s that had been largely forgotten, replaced by a new totem in a red suit and a false beard.
    • Chapter 11, “Behold the Man” (p. 142)
  • I hate inefficiency. You’d have to look a long long ways before you found a better example of it than the press conference.
    • Chapter 12, “The Productions of Time” (p. 150)
  • By then I was sure the universe could no longer surprise me, nor interest me. I was wrong. It managed to do both in no more than ten minutes.
    • Chapter 17, “When We Went to See the End of the World” (p. 205)
  • “You see…when you get right down to it, I don’t believe you have my daughter. I won’t until I see her. And having seen her, I won’t believe I could lose her again.”
    Sherman looked at him for a long time.
    “The universe is, so far as I know, Doctor Mayer, indifferent to what you believe or disbelieve.”
    • Chapter 19, “Lest Darkness Fall” (p. 233)
  • I have come to believe, based on long experience dealing with humans, that no true story ever gets told.
    I sit here now with two stories, about to add lies, half-truths, or simple misunderstandings of my own, moved by some vague urge toward a completeness of things—a completion that can never be achieved.
    • Epilogue, “All the Time in the World” (p. 243)
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