Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1054731 in Books
• Published on: 1978-10-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 316 pages

Customer Reviews

Brilliant!
This is a very good short story collection which was also published as "THE PERSISTENCE OF VISION". This was my first John Varley book and his best. The stories are: "The Phantom of Kansas", "Air Raid", "Retrograde Summer", "The Black Hole Passes", "In the Hall of the Martian Kings", "In the Bowl", "Gotta Sing, Gotta Dance", "Overdrawn at the Memory Bank" and "The Persistance of Vision". As you may guess from the titles there is a strong tendency towards "hard" SF with stories set on Venus, Mars, Mercury, Janus and a space station, along with time-travel, back-up storage of the mind, a man trapped inside a computer. These stories are very human, optimistic, sexually liberated and apart from anything else, a good read.

Other trivial information: the title story won a Nebula award for best Novella, others may have also won awards; "Air Raid" was the story that the film "Millenium" was based on; "Overdrawn at the Memory Bank" was also made into a film. The author has also written a book called "Millenium" which presumably is an expansion of "Air Raid".

This is worth seeking out.