Tuesday, February 18, 2020

Demon by John Varley

(pb; 1984: third novel in the Gaea trilogy)

From the back cover

“. . . the satellite-sized alien Gaea has gone completely insane. She has trapped humans in her mind. She has transformed her love of old movies into monstrous realities. She is Marilyn Monroe. She is King Kong. And she must be destroyed.”


Review

Set thirteen years after Wizard, this third and final Gaea novel tracks Jones, her allies and her enemies as the ex-Wizard wages a guerrilla war against Gaea, whose erratic, mass-death proclivities have grown worse, speeding up a ticking-clock-to-doomsday situation. Demon, like its predecessor books, balances ongoing (and consciousness-shifting) characters, hard and soft science fiction, a love of Golden Age Hollywood, sex and realistic, sometimes dark, takes on human nature, as well as vividly described action and fantasy sequences. This trilogy, one of my all-time-favorite science fiction reads, is worth your time if you are not a prude about sex, or not open to hybrid-genre science fiction.

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