I get really fed up when a potentially great project gets stuffed up by laziness, dumbness, a shoddy approach, or dubious commercial motivation. It’s not that I’m necessarily immune to some of these things myself (I’ve certainly been lazy, dumb, and/or shoddy at times), but they just grate on my nerves. I especially hate it when a book project is announced and you go “yes!” and then it gets royally stuffed up.

There are countless examples. I remember when, way back in 1990, a major Larry Niven career retrospective was announced. Now, Niven wrote some of the most exciting hard SF short fiction of the late ’60s and early ’70s. A big collection, assembling the very best of those stories would have been a wonderful thing, the kind of book that everyone should own. But the book, N-Space, was crap. It featured essays, minor stories and (unforgivably) novel excerpts, in amongst some terrific major work. A terrible disappointment. Perhaps enough time has passed – it’s been almost 15 years now – that someone could do a major ‘Best of Larry Niven’ but I have my doubts. More recently there was The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge. Vinge is an interesting writer, and a single volume ‘collected stories’ wasn’t a bad idea. But, the book omits his single most famous short story, “True Names”. As it happened, another book was published at pretty much the same time that featured that story and some essays about it. But, so what! It wasn’t the collected stories, it was dumb.

I could go on and on, but what I want to do is mention a great recent book where they got it right. I remember, as though it were yesterday, being turned on to the science fiction of John Varley. I stumbled across a paperback edition on In the Hall of the Martian Kings, and was entranced. Strange, challenging, and yet reminiscent of Heinlein (who I loved above all else at the time), it seemed like the pure stuff. Real SF. And the stories kept coming, right through to the smack in the face of “Press Enter”. And then we got the collection Blue Champagne from Dark Harvest, and it stopped. From the mid-’80s through till last year, when a couple good stories were published, there was almost no Varley short fiction and not that much at novel length. A major career retrospective seemed like an obvious book to publish, at least to me, but it kept not happening until the good folk at Ace announced they would do it. And The John Varley Reader was born. Collecting 18 stories and adding a bunch of fascinating biographical material, it’s what a major retrospective should be. The best-of-the-best stories presented so modern readers can get at them, nothing less than a single volume argument as to why the writer is important and worth reading. The John Varley Reader does that, and in spades. It could have added “Blue Champagne”, but that’s a personal taste thing. This is book you need to own. Kudos to Ginjer Buchanan and every one at Ace for having the guts and the savvy to do the book right.