The Golden Globe

I can't believe its taken me so long to get to this. Varley's 8 Worlds is one of the great sci-fi series and this was published in 1998! This was a boy's coming of age (at 30 odd), mixed in with Shakespeare, funny dog stories, and a chase across the Solar System. Varley has a way of integrating his setting into the arc of the protagonist's life in a way that seems obvious but is definitely a fun house mirror way of looking at the current world. He is still, maybe, too rooted in Americana which seems a little obvious to my European eye (for example, why would a post-scarcity society still run on money) but this is a minor nitpick. Cannot recommend highly enough.