Varley was born in Austin, Texas. He grew up in Fort Worth, moved to Port Arthur in 1957, graduated from Nederland High School—all in Texas—and went to Michigan State University on a National Merit Scholarship. He started as a physics major, switched to English, then left school before his 20th birthday and arrived in Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco just in time for the "Summer of Love" in 1967. There he worked at various unskilled jobs, depended on St. Anthony's Mission for meals, and panhandled outside the Cala Market on Stanyan Street before deciding that writing had to be a better way to make a living. He was serendipitously present at Woodstock in 1969 when his car ran out of gas a half-mile away. He also has lived at various times in Portland and Eugene, Oregon, New York City, San Francisco again, Berkeley, and Los Angeles. Varley has written several novels and numerous short stories, many of them in a future history, "The Eight Worlds". These stories are set a century or two after a race of mysterious and omnipotent aliens, the Invaders, have almost completely eradicated humans from the Earth. But humans have inhabited virtually every other corner of the solar system, often through the use of biological modifications learned, in part, by eavesdropping on alien communications. Varley's "Overdrawn at the Memory Bank" was adapted and televised for PBS in 1983. In addition, two of his short stories were adapted into episodes of the short-lived 1998 Sci-Fi Channel TV seriesWelcome to Paradox. Varley spent some years in Hollywood but the only tangible result of this stint was the film Millennium. Of his Millennium experience Varley said: Varley is often compared to Robert A. Heinlein. In addition to a similarly descriptive writing style, similarities include free societies and free love. Two of his connected novels, Steel Beach and The Golden Globe, include a sub-society of Heinleiners. The Golden Globe also contains a society evolved from a prison colony on Pluto and a second society evolved from it on Pluto's moon, Charon, similar to the situation found in Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. Unlike Heinlein's lunar society, Varley's convict society on Charon maintains its criminal ways and is similar to the mafia or the yakuza. His Thunder and Lightning series plays on his connection with Heinlein by deriving its main characters' names from many of Heinlein's characters, including Jubal, Manuel Garcia, Kelly, Podkayne, Cassie and Polly, and by frequently dropping titles of Heinlein's novels in the dialogue. Early in his career Varley wrote a trilogy of novels set in a sentient hollow world reminiscent in structure to a very large Stanford torusspace habitat, but with a distinctly different personality. The three volumes are titled Titan, Wizard, and Demon.
