The John Varley Reader
Page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
INTRODUCTION TO “Picnic on Nearside”
PICNIC ON NEARSIDE
INTRODUCTION TO “Overdrawn at the Memory Bank”
INTRODUCTION TO “In the Hall of the Martian Kings”
INTRODUCTION TO “Gotta Sing, Gotta Dance”
INTRODUCTION TO “The Barbie Murders”
INTRODUCTION TO “The Phantom of Kansas”
INTRODUCTION TO “Beatnik Bayou”
INTRODUCTION TO “Air Raid”
INTRODUCTION TO “The Persistence of Vision”
INTRODUCTION TO “PRESS ENTER ■”
INTRODUCTION TO “The Pusher”
INTRODUCTION TO “Tango Charlie and Foxtrot Romeo”
INTRODUCTION TO “Options”
INTRODUCTION TO “Just Another Perfect Day”
INTRODUCTION TO “In Fading Suns and Dying Moons”
INTRODUCTION TO “The Flying Dutchman”
INTRODUCTION TO “Good Intentions”
INTRODUCTION TO “The Bellman”
AFTER WORD
COPYRIGHTS AND PERMISSIONS
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2004 by John Varley.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
eISBN : 978-0-441-01195-7
1. Science fiction, American. I. Title.
PS3572.A724A6 2004
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2004050349
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INTRODUCTION TO The John Varley Reader
On January 20, 2002, at 2:30 in the afternoon, a fire broke out in the big, abandoned fruit and vegetable market and warehouse covering the two blocks between SE 10th and 11th, Belmont and Taylor, in Portland, Oregon. By the time the fire department arrived there was little they could do but try to keep the fire from spreading to adjacent buildings. In less than half an hour a fourth alarm was called in. At peak, 125 firefighters were involved. Eventually the fire reached the north end of the warehouse, which abutted the building that used to contain the Monte Carlo restaurant, where Lee and I spent some pleasant years in one of the two great old apartments above.
It is very strange to look at the gutted remains of a place you used to call home.
Only the edges of the tiled roof survived. Some of the huge old attic beams still stood, though the fire had eaten deeply. In back, the roof and the attic floor had fallen and taken the walls and floors of our bedroom and offices with them. A tiny portion of the south wall of Lee’s office was visible, one of the walls with the decorative sponge painting job she had been so proud of.
Taking the good with the bad, the Monte Carlo was a pretty cool place to live. On a coolness scale of 1 to 10, with Leavenworth Prison being a 1, San Simeon a 10, and Travis McGee’s “Busted Flush” houseboat a 9, the Monte Carlo was an 8.
The apartment looked out on downtown Portland from across the river. On the fourth of July, Cinco de Mayo, and half a dozen festivals each year we could watch the fireworks from our windows. The restaurant itself was a hangout for half the elderly Italian population of Portland. Lots of guys who looked like Don Corleone showed up most days. They made the best minestrone in town. While we were there it became the hot nightspot for Reed College students, doing some disco revival thing, then went back to its old slumber again as fashion moved on to a new spot.
We knew it was a firetrap. Only one stairway, made of old dry wood. It was the only place I ever lived that was plumbed for beverages. Flexible plastic tubes led from pressurized bottles in the basement, up our stairs, and through a wall into the bar below. I figured if a fire got started I’d cut a pipe and drown the blaze with 7-Up or Coke. I’d have to be careful not to confuse it with the other pipes, which were full of vodka, Scotch, and gin. I thought of splicing into one, like stealing cable service, but decided it wasn’t worth it for bar whiskey.
Many people go through their entire lives without ever living in an 8, and I’ve lived in three. The first was 1354 Haight Street, San Francisco, a block and a half from the Center of the Universe. You could almost see the Haight & Ashbury sign from there. Across the street was a head shop, the floor above was a notorious crank house where we once saw Janis Joplin going in to score, and down at the corner was Magnolia Thunderpussy, probably the coolest ice cream parlor in America. I feel very lucky to have lived there for a year, and to have survived, as we were all experimenting with various drugs at the time.
I’ve been lucky about many things.
This year, 2004, marks the thirtieth anniversary of my first publication of a science fiction story. That strikes me as a pretty good time for a retrospective. Such a thing ought to have an introduction.
I didn’t always feel that way. When I started out as a writer, I was very uncomfortable with interviews, radio, and television. In fact, I still hate to do self-promotion. I felt the stories ought to speak for themselves. So my first story collection, The Persistence of Vision, had a very flattering introduction by Algis Budrys, because my publisher insisted on it, and the next two, The Barbie Murders and Blue Champagne, had nothing at all; just a table of contents and the stories.
I’m not saying I’m an exceptionally private person. I’ve gone to conventions, sat on panels discussing my works and science fiction in general. My phone number has always been a listed one, and I’ve only regretted that once. And I’ve recently gone public in a big way, for me, by opening a website where I post my thoughts (what they call blogs these days) and odd items I write that I don’t feel are likely to sell.
But re-reading these stories, thinking about them and about the recent fire and the transience of things and of life itself, realizing that since I don’t build things, haven’t founded any corporations, and am not likely to revolutionize science with a stunning new discovery anytime soon, my most important legacy will be these stories. And while I still believe they must stand
on their own with no explanations from me, that they must speak for themselves . . . it strikes me that telling a little about where I was, what I was doing, and who I was when I wrote them might be of interest to readers.
It is probably as close to an autobiography as I will ever get. I don’t propose to write one here, and I don’t intend to put it all up front in one indigestible lump, either. Instead, I will scatter it through the book in introductions to the individual stories. If you aren’t interested in stuff like that, feel free to skip to the stories themselves, which is what this volume is all about, anyway. But if you do enjoy the introductions you are invited to join me at www.varley.net for lots more.
INTRODUCTION TO “Picnic on Nearside”
The Monte Carlo fire was not the first time a place I had recently lived in burned. 1735 Waller Street in San Francisco was a 6 on the cool-places-to-live scale. Maybe a 6.5. It would have scored higher because the location was great—half a block away from Golden Gate Park, one block from Haight Street—but this was the early seventies, and the Haight-Ashbury had come down a bit since the “golden age” of the hippies. In fact, the streets were littered with the wreckage of those people whose experiments in mind expansion had not stopped with marijuana and LSD, but had moved on to the joys of crank and heroin. Many of the storefronts were empty, and most of the old Victorian houses were firetraps.
Go back there now and you will see that gentrification has hit the neighborhood like a gold-plated hammer. Everything has been rehabilitated and repainted and the people living there are urban professionals. They are the only ones who can afford it. I doubt that I could rent a closet at 1735 for the $175/month that I used to pay for the whole four-bedroom second-floor flat. There’s a McDonald’s on the corner of Haight and Stanyan. The old Straight Theater is gone, replaced by an upscale Goodwill store. Most of the rest of the businesses deal in antiques.
I have to confess I liked it better in the seventies, even though I might have died there.
There was an ex-Jehovah’s Witness named Teardrop who lived in a room below us. He was one of the sweetest guys I’ve ever met, but he had one bad habit: he smoked in bed. That would have been dangerous enough, but he was also epileptic. One night he had a seizure, and in minutes his room was an inferno. I stumbled downstairs with my family in a torrent of smoke, virtually blind.
The SFFD is very quick; they arrived while I was still coughing, and had the fire out before much damage was done. We were all safe, Teardrop didn’t even have a minor burn, but I was always nervous about the place after that.
With good reason. One month after we moved to Eugene, Oregon, fire gutted the place. It was empty for years, but has now been restored.
It was while living in this flat that I first got the idea that I might try to write and sell science fiction stories. The reason was simple. I needed the money.
I had left southeast Texas on a National Merit Scholarship to Michigan State, mostly because on the list of schools which had accepted me and whose tuition and room and board the scholarship would cover, MSU was the most distant from Texas. I began as a physics major, then saw how hard and how little fun that was going to be, switched to English, found that to be rather dry, and hit the road in the footsteps of Jack Kerouac. I thought of myself as a beatnik until I got to the Haight during the Summer of Love, where I first heard the word hippie.
Within a few hours of our arrival my traveling companion, Chris, and I found ourselves in San Francisco sitting on the floor of an empty storefront on Stanyan Street with a few dozen others, a place run by people called The Diggers, feasting on free chicken necks and chanting some Hindu mantra with Allen Ginsberg playing a hand organ about the size of Schroeder’s piano.
So just what do hippies do? we wanted to know. Write angry poetry? Sit around coffee shops? Plot to overthrow the government with force and violence? Well, no, mostly we sing and dance to groups like the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Big Brother and the Holding Company (while sneering at groups from Los Angeles and New York), smoke or ingest various psychedelic substances, and just generally groove on life. Oh, yeah, and we are in favor of peace and free love, which means we screw a lot.
Your basic sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll.
Works for me.
We had been squeaking by for years on nothing much. I think it may have been easier in those days than it is today to exist with no visible means of support. There was a feeling of community, even in the drug-ravaged streets of the Haight. We never even considered illegal activities, never stole anything, never dealt in drugs. We never had to. If people had stuff, they shared.
That’s not to say it was easy. Standing in line at St. Anthony’s Mission downtown for their daily (and surprisingly good) free lunch was fun. Standing outside the Lucky market on Stanyan Street panhandling got old quickly. In fact, after about five years on the roads between LA and New York and San Francisco and Berkeley, dodging the draft board all the way, it was all starting to get old.
In all my meanderings I had never held an actual job for more than a few weeks. I washed dishes. I worked in a warehouse wrapping packages. I lasted for three days as a “flyboy” at the end of a printing press, gathering up advertising circulars still wet with ink in stacks of fifty, always falling behind as the press spit out paper faster than I could pick it up, until I realized one night I was becoming part of the machine, and the least efficient part of it, at that. I bused tables (and to this day will not bus my own table at fast-food places). That was about the extent of my labor skills. That is still about the extent of my skills.
So what did I have that people would pay money for? A handful of credits toward a B.A. in English, one creative writing class which I seldom attended after I heard the lame assignments the teacher was giving out, and an extensive background in science fiction. Reading it, not writing it.
I’d been doing it since Mr. Green, the librarian at my junior high school, handed me a copy of Red Planet, by Robert A. Heinlein, and said I might enjoy it, very much as a street-corner dealer in heroin will give you a free sample.
Could I write this stuff? Could I write it well? Would people pay me for it? I didn’t know the answers to any of these questions, but with the optimism of youth I decided it couldn’t hurt anything to try, between stints of bumming spare change. What’s the worst that could happen? Rejection slips. Believe me, standing outside the Lucky market you quickly get a very thick skin when it comes to rejection.
I sat down at a little desk at 1735 Waller Street and started to write a novel.
I wrote it in ballpoint pen, on ruled notebook paper, just like I had in high school. It was called Gas Giant, and it was pretty bad. (I still like the title; maybe I’ll use it someday.) I taught myself to type—badly, I still look at the keyboard—on an electric Smith-Corona that I bought for $5 at a thrift store. Then I sent the novel out and started collecting the well-deserved rejection slips. It began to seem that Hugo and Nebula awards for this book were just an idle dream, not to mention the New York Times bestseller list and that screenwriting Oscar.
But I didn’t give up. To stay busy I wrote the following short story, “Picnic on Nearside.” Actually, it was a novelette, but I didn’t even know that term at the time. It was 12,563 words long . . . by actual count. (I later learned that you could count three representative pages and average them. Who knew?) I sent it out to Ed Ferman at The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and a few months later I got back a nice letter. Mr. Ferman said he liked the story a lot, but he’d like it a lot better if it was 10,000 words. I spent all of five minutes raging about idiot editors, then sat down and started crossing stuff out. I declared war on modifiers, clauses, sentences, entire paragraphs that had snuck in there when I wasn’t looking. I got it down to pretty much exactly 10,000 words . . . and discovered that I had accidentally improved the story tremendously. I sent it back, and a few months later got a check for $200.
That was a whole month’s rent, with $25 left ov
er to buy records!
I decided this was the life for me.
PICNIC ON NEARSIDE
THIS IS THE story of how I went to the Nearside and found old Lester and maybe grew up a little. And about time, too, as Carnival would say. Carnival is my mother. We don’t get along well most of the time, and I think it’s because I’m twelve and she’s ninety-six. She says it makes no difference, and she waited so long to have her child because she wanted to be sure she was ready for it. And I answer back that at her age she’s too far away from childhood to remember what it’s like. And she replies that her memory is perfect all the way back to her birth. And I retort . . .
We argue a lot.
I’m a good debater, but Carnival’s a special problem. She’s an Emotionalist; so anytime I try to bring facts into the argument she waves it away with a statement like, “Facts only get in the way of my preconceived notions.” I tell her that’s irrational, and she says I’m perfectly right, and she meant it to be. Most of the time we can’t even agree on premises to base a disagreement on. You’d think that would be the death of debate, but if you did, you don’t know Carnival and me.
The major topic of debate around our warren for seven or eight lunations had been the Change I wanted to get. The battle lines had been drawn, and we had been at it every day. She thought a Change would harm my mind at my age. Everybody was getting one.
We were all sitting at the breakfast table. There was me and Carnival, and Chord, the man Carnival has lived with for several years, and Adagio, Chord’s daughter. Adagio is seven.
There had been a big battle the night before between me and Carnival. It had ended up (more or less) with me promising to divorce her as soon as I was of age. I don’t remember what the counterthreat was. I had been pretty upset.