John Varley is one of my all-time favorite authors, whose "Eight Worlds" stories and novels have been strung out over decades, weaving together critical takes on Heinlein and other "golden age" writers with mindfuckingly great technological/philosophical speculation, genderbending, genre-smashing prose, and some of the most likable, standout characters in the field.

Monty sez, "John Varley, one of the most original science fiction authors ever, is selling his collection of '18+ U-Haul Boxes' worth of toy robots on e-bay. This link takes you to a page on his excellent website (Varley reviews movies and books like nobody's business)that explains the sale and links to the relevant ebay pages and pictures of the toy robots. — Read the rest

In First Contact, Book 1 of David Marusek's (previously) science fiction series Upon This Rock, an alien being crash lands in a remote corner of Alaska, not far from a family-cult of preppers for the end times, and the alien exploits the beliefs of the family patriarch by posing as an angel sent to earth to initiate the final conflict. — Read the rest

From 1989 to 1994, the public broadcaster TV Ontario ran Prisoners of Gravity, a brilliant science fiction TV show that used a goofy framing device (a host trapped in a satellite who interviewed science fiction writers stuck down on Earth) for deep, gnarly, fascinating dives into science fiction's greatest and most fascinating themes, from sex and overpopulation to cyberpunk and religion.

Readers of Boing Boing have joined me in chronicling the variegated science fiction career of Mur Lafferty: novelist, podcast pioneer, editor -- today, she publishes her latest novel, a hard sf murder mystery called Six Wakes, in which the crew of a generation ship awake in a blood-drenched shipboard cloning bay, in fresh bodies to replace their murdered selves floating in the alarming null-gee, memories restored to the backup they made just before launch, a quarter-century before.

Locus magazine has published its annual recommended reading list, which signposts the best in science fiction and fantasy from the previous year.

Locus magazine has just released its 2012 Recommended Reading List of science fiction/fantasy/horror, which is always a great reading guide (and a fabulous resource for those of us nominating for the Hugo awards. I'm delighted to see my novel Pirate Cinema and Rapture of the Nerds (written with Charlie Stross) on the best novel list! — Read the rest

Dead-Air sez, "At the Science Fiction Message Board the results are in for our 2009 'Author August' post-a-thon extravaganza! The regular members, along with some visitors lured by news of the upcoming event, have nominated a wildly diverse range of authors. — Read the rest

Spider Robinson's latest podcast installment is a reading of John Varley's towering and brilliant 1979 novella, "The Persistence of Vision," winner of both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. I'm a gigantic John Varley fan (especially of his short fiction) and this story may be the best of the lot. — Read the rest

My editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, rang me yesterday to talk about a weird little phenomenon: people who were going to stores looking for my newest, Little Brother, were walking away unfulfilled because they were looking in the science fiction section, not the young adult section. — Read the rest

I've just finished reading Rolling Thunder, John Varley's wonderful sequel to Red Thunder and Red Lightning, his ongoing series of tributes to the golden age of Heinlein's juvenile sf novels.

The Thunder and Lightning books are fantastic, action-packed, science-packed homages to Heinlein's best work, and Rolling Thunder is no exception. — Read the rest

Tony C Smith says:

StarShipSofa is a weekly podcast that has started to put out Hugo Winning audio stories for free. Last week we put up David Brin's 1985 Hugo winning story "The Crystal Spheres." This week we put up Bruce Sterling's 1989 story "We See Things Differently."

Red Lightning, the latest novel from John Varley, is the book Robert A Heinlein would have written if he lived in George Bush's America. Varley is a kind of latter-day, humanist Heinlein, someone who writes science fiction of great imagination and verve (I stole all the best stuff in my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, from John Varley stories), with so much soul they like to tear your heart out. — Read the rest

I'm pretty well-read in the modern sf canon, but there are some gaps in there that are almost embarrassing in scope. Take Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars. This doorstopper, clocking in at nearly 800 pages, is the first volume in a trilogy of comparably-sized companion volumes, each of which depicts a different vision of the [dis|u]topiian establishment of a permanent human settlement on Mars. — Read the rest

I grew up on John Varley's short fiction (careful readers of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom will note several loving tributes to Varley's work), and still return to collections like The Barbie Murders, Blue Champagne and the magnificent The Persistence of Vision nearly every year, re-reading those stories and marvelling anew at how deft and clever Varley's hand is. — Read the rest

Normally, I post reviews of my book on the reviews page of the book-blog, but this is so damned cool — The Onion has reviewed my novel!

Cory Doctorow's first novel, Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom, borrows freely from tropes established by pioneers like John Varley, Spider Robinson, and Robert Silverberg, and refined more recently by the likes of William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, and Rudy Rucker.

A deaf lesbian couple have disclosed that they sought out deaf sperm donors for their two young children, both of whom are deaf. The couple believe that deafness is a cultural identity as well as a physical reality. As I understand it, this is the same reasoning behind the rejection of cochlear implants by deaf parents for their children. — Read the rest