Reddit reviews Picnic On Nearside

I mean, that's sort of true...there are only three novels in the series, and two of them (the written-much-later Steel Beach and The Golden Globe) are actually sort of set in an alternate version of the future history. The rest of the series is short fiction. You can see a chronology of Varley's short fiction here. For a while it was really hard to find copies of his short story collections, but there are now Kindle editions of The Persistence of Vision, Picnic on Nearside, and Blue Champagne. The stories are all scrambled up time-wise, though—Varley's first published story, "Picnic on Nearside" is in the second collection.

Edit: seriously, if you haven't read "Picnic on Nearside", give it a shot right now.