Sources are reporting that John Varley has died.
He's one of the bigs for me.
His Titan (1979) was the first I'd seen, and I was 12, and it was among the first novels that I read that did not shy away from sex. And it was not vanilla hetero cis sex. It's entirely possible that my general sex positivity has a deep root in this book.
Its sequel, Wizard (1980), has a frontispiece detailing the many, many different ways its centaurs could parent offspring (each centaur has human-similar male or female organs in front, a horse-like male organ in the middle, and a horse-like female organ in the back, and you have to fertilize in front to get an egg and in back to get a fetus from the egg).
His original Eight Worlds chronology, mostly in short stories I read later, was remarkable in applying SF to sex. (His setting, of humanity being exiled from Earth by incomprehensible aliens, and this not being the narrative focus of the stories, was distinctive but not quite as remarkable.)
His later revisit to the setting, Steel Beach (1992), was notable for having a primary character have sex changes on a nearly casual basis, and for considering what sexual preference means when you can change bodies nearly casually -- are you hetero regardless of body and therefore switch preference when you switch bodies, or are you female-preferring regardless of which body you're in, etc. Obviously, real human sexual preference is more nuanced and variable than Varley had in mind, but at least he was trying, bless his heart.
Toward the later end of his career, he embarked on a number of consciously Heinleinian pastiches, led by Red Thunder (2003). The later books in the same line ended up in a Heinleinian creepy place, but at least the first one is, as one would say, a rollicking romp through old school SF, complete with a novel technology that solves all personal and systematic problems.
Overall: He wrote well, taking new perspectives on old questions and tackling new questions. He's not perfect, but he exceeds the expectations for his generation.
