Overlooked classic: John Varley's Gaea trilogy

(Discussion of this post on Reddit’s r/printSF)

There are a lot of famous sci-fi books where our heroes explore an enigmatic alien megastructure. The first one that comes to mind for me is Larry Niven’s Ringworld:

There’s also Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama, which I’ve lost my copy of, but which Denis Villeneuve is apparently making into a movie! And the genre’s still going: arguably Iain M. Bank’s 2008 book Matter falls into this same category.

A bit less well-known than these is John Varley’s inventive Gaea trilogy, the books Titan, Wizard, and Demon:

These three books have a very different take than the other “exploring the huge alien thingy” stories I mentioned above. In Rama, the whole plot (spoiler alert!) is pretty much “land on megastructure, see a bunch of stuff we don’t understand, then leave.” In Ringworld, the protagonists crash-land on the structure and then struggle their way across it for a few months before escaping. But over the course of the Gaea trilogy, our protagonist Cirocco Jones spends probably 100 years in-world, first as an explorer, then later as a sort of roving employee, then as a rebel. It’s a sprawling story, and one that gives itself plenty of time to settle in.

The books also explore a lot of cool ideas about alien consciousness and the morality of creating sentient beings. The Titan megastructure is full of bizarre and imaginative creatures, including centaur-like beings that speak in music and have an improbable affinity for Greek scale modes. And the story is good fun; more pop-cultural and less scientifically serious and high-minded than some of the older books in the genre.

As with any story written many decades ago, some parts might be a bit jarring to the modern reader. There’s some pretty cavalier treatment of sexual assault, for example (though arguably no worse than in the 2012 movie Prometheus, say). And some of the tossed-off lines which I obliviously read over as a youngster would now probably make me do a double-take.

Still, the series is well worth a read (or a re-read) if you want a gonzo, bunch-of-ideas-at-once take on this classic genre. Varley’s Eight Worlds series is also plenty of fun, and contains one of my all-time favorite ideas about how an alien invasion of Earth might play out. It starts with The Ophiuchi Hotline, and goes all the way through Irontown Blues in 2018, which I kept forgetting about, since it came out twenty years after the previous book in the series. I finally ordered it just today!