aea, the sentient world, has gone insane, become senile, or both. Whether due to her incredible age or the traumatic events at the end of Wizard,
she has chosen to abandon the management of her ecosystem and start enjoying herself. Incarnated as a 50-foot-tall replica of Marilyn Monroe, she creates a flock of creatures that shoot and develop film, and then she haphazardly sets about making movies when she isn't showing old Earth films at her massive traveling carnival. Meanwhile, her bioengineered pods rescue and heal the terrified refugees of Earth's cataclysmic nuclear war, then dump them unceremoniously in her decaying interior, where many promptly become slaves or food in the newly-built human slums.
Meanwhile, former NASA captain Cirocco Jones, self-described as the oldest and most paranoid human alive, struggles to survive and bring Gaea down. She has the help and trust of Gaea's most promising species, particularly the powerful, centaurlike Titanides, but the world itself is against her. And new creatures--giant sentient flying bombers and rotting zombies among them--are being created every day to fight her. At least, when Gaea's focused enough to pay attention to the conflict.
What Gaea really wants, in her addled way, is to force a hugely cinematic final confrontation with Cirocco. So she arranges to kidnap Adam, the child she engineered as the perfect bait. The child of two of Cirocco's friends, he carries a genetic component that will guarantee the continued existence of the Titanides--and free Cirocco of the heartbreaking responsibility of remaining alive to ensure that they do as well.
A great grand noisy carnival of a book
Demon, written four years after the one-two punch of its precursors Titan (1979) and Wizard (1980), is the only book in Varley's Gaean series not to make the running for either a Hugo or Nebula award. Whether it's weaker than the series' previous books may be a matter of taste, but it's certainly the oddest and the most uneven. It has less hard science, less focus and less careful characterization, but a lot more unpredictable events, unusual people and general Sturm und Drang. It's exciting, imaginative, and characteristically written on a grand, sprawling scale, but less rooted in any kind of human reality.
And the pacing is as wobbly as the content. Some critical events happen so quickly that it's entirely too easy to miss them (as when a romance that was central to Wizard breaks up offstage with only a bare sidelong mention), whereas other plot lines (especially the attempt to rescue Adam) are drawn out over years of book-time for little apparent reason.
But even if it doesn't all cohere as smoothly as its prequels did, Demon is still a novel that's packed full of individual moments and scenes that stack up to the best writing Varley's done. He seems incapable of creating a character without a complex motivation or an interaction without a complex sociological background, but he explains everythingly simply and smoothly, with a minimum of wasteful padding. These are Great Big Books in the best sense--grand, almost space-operatic yarns from the days before it was necessary to write a thousand-page epic to tell an epic-sized story.
