6 December, 2001: Blue Champagne
John Varley's best work is reminiscent of middle-period Heinlein: tightly paced and eminently readable, adventure stories wrapped around a core of a single interesting idea. But his short story collection Blue Champagne, lacks one of my favorite Varley stories, "The Barbie Murders", is padded out with two stories that aren't really stories (one of which, "The Manhattan Phone Book (Abridged)", I rather like), and features prize-winning stories that aren't that impressive. The Hugo-winning "Press Enter", could have been a Robin Cook plot treatment; comparing it to Neuromancer, which won the best novel Hugo the same year, shows how dated it is. The equally dated "Options" picked up a Tiptree Award for explorations of gender issues; one of the core ideas of Varley's Nine Worlds future histories is that one day changing sexes will be as easy and understated as getting a haircut, but Varley has done more interesting variations on the theme. Varley's Nine World works are spottily great, but the Nine Worlds stories in this collection are largely at the earlier and less interesting end of his timeline, before or immediately after the aliens arrive and wipe human civilization off the face of the Earth. Although "Foxtrot Romeo and Tango Charlie" is a great story, one of the best that Varley has written, newcomers to his work are probably better off picking up Steel Beach (and avoiding his "Gaean Trilogy" like the plague).