Most of Varley's work is set in a future in which man has been driven from the earth by vastly superior aliens and is forced to live on various planets of the solar system. These stories are concerned with the impact of a number of technological advances on society and individuals. The sublime short story, "Equinoctial" (from Picnic on Nearside) tells of life as a symb (a genetically engineered human-plant symbiote that can live in space) among Saturn's rings. "Options" (from Blue Champagne) shows how people might adjust to simple sex-changing. The novel, The Ophiuchi Hotline, brings all these together, exploring amongst other things the consequences of cloning and mind recording--all the facets of the plot are told from the points of view of different clones of the same person. This novel is a superb example of recent SF with new ideas that restore the sense of wonder lost since older ideas were too frequently repeated or overtaken by reality.
His other major series, the Gaean trilogy (Titan, Wizard, and Demon) is SF dressed up as fantasy. It tells of the struggle between a god-like and increasingly mad intelligence that controls or is a spaceship-world and a human who has come to live in it. As in all Varley's books, the characters of the people are closly examined, with particular attention to how they are different from us in their unusual environment.
M.H. Zool