rriving on the American SF scene in the mid-1970s, just as the New Wave was dying down and the genre was seeking fresh direction, John Varley almost immediately became an acclaimed and revolutionary force in speculative fiction. Combining the style and sensibility of Robert A. Heinlein with the idealism and social radicalism of '60s California, he produced a rapid succession of breezy, taboo-breaking, conceptually innovative stories and novellas, many set in the complex milieu of the Eight Worlds. In that imagined future, alien Invaders annihilate virtually all humans on the Earth, leaving the spacefaring remnants of our species to survive on the moon and various other planets and planetary satellites around the solar system; in tunnels, caverns, domes and habitats, those people and their descendants flourish, creating all manner of novel economic, political and lifestyle systems. But the Invaders may have noticed this irritating persistence ...
Varley has remained an important force in SF ever since. His stories in the Eight Worlds sequence, along with many other impressive tales, have been collected in The Persistence of Vision (1978), The Barbie Murders (1980), Blue Champagne (1986) and, very recently, the excellent big retrospective volume The John Varley Reader (2004). The Eight Worlds novels are The Ophiuchi Hotline (1977), Steel Beach (1992) and The Golden Globe (1998); the popular Gaea trilogy is made up of Titan (1979), Wizard (1980) and Demon (1984); Millennium (1983) ties in with the film of the same name, based on Varley's short story "Air Raid" (1977); and Red Thunder (2003) is the opening of a new series taking its inspiration from Heinlein's famous "juveniles" of the 1940s, '50s and '60s. Mammoth, a major new novel, will appear from Ace Books in June 2005.
Science Fiction Weekly interviewed John Varley by e-mail in December 2004.
Your story introductions in The John Varley Reader describe rather vividly your time as a hippie not far from the Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco in the early '70s. Considering the social trends set out in your early Eight Worlds short stories, would it be fair to call you an author of hippie SF?
Varley: I prefer to think of myself, in those days, as a hippie author of SF. And where I lived was not far from the corner of Haight and Ashbury, from about 1967 to the early '70s; I'd consider it the heart of the Haight. I incorporated the zeitgeist of the times into my stories. It was the ocean I swam in. "All you need is love." "Turn on, tune in, drop out." "Kill the pigs." I subscribed to all these simplistic notions at one time or another. (Well, I was never in favor of killing police, but I saw them as the enemy.) So the stories of the Eight Worlds were born in that atmosphere. Since then I've learned a bit, I hope, and have tried to make the world a little more like it actually exists. Call it growing up, or call it losing one's innocence. Or call it selling out. Doesn't bother me.
Your Eight Worlds series, made up to date of three novels and many shorter works, is founded on a striking concept: alien Invaders, angered by humankind's ecological mistreatment of the Earth, clear us off our home planet, leaving alive only a few thousand people on the moon and elsewhere. How did this conception first come to you? Then and now, did you and do you see the Invaders' action as in some sense a just penalty?
Varley: I can't recall where the idea originated, except that at the time I was reading some books by John Lilly, about dolphins and whales and what kind of consciousness they might have. I realized their worldview, through their sonar senses, would be radically different from ours. The central problem in viewing whales as intelligent, for me, was a simple one: Why don't they avoid getting harpooned? It would be easy, you know. If they just radically changed course and dived, they could lose the pursuing boat every time. But they swim placidly along until the harpoon goes in. So they respond to pain, but they seem to find it impossible to be concerned about our activities until it's too late to avoid death. So maybe something else is going on with them, maybe their outlook on life is so different that they don't fear death. Noodling with that idea, I came up with alien creatures that lived in the atmospheric seas of gas giant planets, who saw cetaceans as intelligent and humans as nothing but pesky, tool-using polluters, and decided they had to do something about us before we wiped out their relatives. As for it being just desserts, there might be some of that in the stories. You could see the Eight Worlds as a second chance, or an exile to the places where pollution doesn't matter, since there is no ecosystem.
In the Reader, you mention an unpublished apprentice novel in the Eight Worlds sequence, Gas Giant. What was the subject of this book, and is there any chance some version will someday see print?
Varley: Gas Giant told the story of the Invasion itself. The chances of my going back and putting it into some sort of publishable form are pretty slim. In retrospect, I rather prefer the Invasion being presented as ancient history, rather than telling the story.
Indeed: In the hands of a lot of writers, the Eight Worlds series might have depicted ongoing human resistance to the Invaders; but you've consistently chosen the less predictable, and more interesting, path of delineating the social customs and personal lives of people living in exile on Luna, Mercury, Pluto, etc. Why this emphasis on everyday life instead of gung-ho adventure?
Varley: If you'd read Gas Giant (and, as I said, you're not likely to), you would understand just how futile resistance would be. The Invasion wasn't a battle at all, unless you consider an anthill being crushed beneath the treads of a tank to be a battle. I did mention in a couple of stories that there was a tiny minority of people who dreamed of reclaiming the Earth, but they were not taken seriously by sane people.
I was never much interested in writing about revolutions, warfare or any of the great social upheavals of politics and violence, except from a person's-eye view. I couldn't write a Tom Clancy novel even if I wanted to. My main interest in writing is people, the awful and grand things that happen to them, and how they deal with it. So my stories will probably always be small-scale. That's just the way I like it.
In a number of ways, the Eight Worlds stories suggest a kind of existential restlessness, a desire constantly to modify and extend the Self—characters change gender quite casually, cloning multiplies an individual's identities, there are forms of symbiosis like that set out in "Gotta Sing, Gotta Dance"... Do you see this drive to personal transcendence as essential to human nature?
Varley: There were some exciting things going on when I began writing these stories. For one, the solar system was being explored; we were getting a different picture of it than the one I grew up with. Mercury wasn't tide-locked the way we thought it was. Venus wasn't covered in swamps. Mars didn't have canals. I exploited some of these ideas in some of my stories. The biological revolution was just getting started. At the time, I had no idea how quick, easy, functional and reversible sex changes could be done, so I threw in gobbledygook about DNA here and there. I had no idea if such things would ever be possible, and I didn't really care. I'm always less concerned with the science itself than with the effects new science has on people's lives. Now, with the human genome mapped and stem-cell research and nanotechnology, we can begin to see possible ways to the kind of human engineering I described. But many of the sociological changes have already begun, with gay rights and new ideas of family. And a lot of it is not pretty. I never really considered the stumbling blocks religious bigots like George W. Bush might put in the way of progress. Religion is a weakness of mine. I always underestimate how truly f--ked up religious people can be.
Transcendence? I don't know what is necessary to the human race. I have enough trouble figuring out what is essential to me. As I age, I confront the question of consciousness more and more every day. What happens to me when I die? I don't expect to find the answer, and there may not be an answer, in the sense that if my consciousness simply vanishes, there was never a question. But my admittedly anemic spiritual side has grown over the years, and I don't think science can provide all answers, like I used to. The nature of science is to ask the next question, which implies that no matter how much you know there will always be a next question. We seem to be bumping our heads on some of the limits of knowledge right now, with superstring theory and quantum mechanics, but people have said that before and been wrong. Bottom line, I think that something is going on with consciousness and the universe that science can't ever put its finger on, and that I won't know what it is in this lifetime. And there may not be another lifetime. Frustrating, but that's life.
The people of the Eight Worlds have constructed various habitats for themselves, but necessarily most are rather claustrophobic: underground cities, tunnels, and the like, as on Luna. In some ways, the resulting societies appear utopian, but in others—reliance on governance and justice by computer, much rather barren cultural nostalgia for pre-Invader Earth—quite sterile. To what extent do the Eight Worlds constitute a conscious utopia? And how long could such a society last, given its limitations, flaws and outside dangers?
Varley: I don't believe in utopias. When I thought about it at all (and I tend to try to avoid thinking about it too much; I prefer to let my stories develop on an unconscious level), I thought I was building a world that was better than ours in some ways. Certainly it is better in standard of living; the technology is so energy-rich that no one has to work for a living; there are no starving people. As for culture, I mentioned the nostalgia aspect partly to be able to use references familiar to a modern reader. A few people complained about that, and I know it's a facile shortcut, but it works for me. There would be new art as well, I just don't know what it would be like. And as for governance by computer ... I don't know if that's good or bad. We haven't tried it. A truly intelligent entity like the Central Computer could be an improvement on what we've tried before. It could hardly be worse than George W. Bush.
The Reader, in addition to many Eight Worlds stories, includes several episodes in the career of the Luna-based policewoman Anna-Louise Bach. The future Bach inhabits resembles that set out in the Eight Worlds sequence—tunnel cities on the moon, et cetera—but differs enormously in its background: There are no exterminating Invaders; Earth remains a human domain. Why, then, is the Bach future so much grimmer in texture than that of the Eight Worlds?
Varley: Anna-Louise came along later, as I'd matured a little and had less faith in finding good answers to some of the central human problems. Compared to Bach's universe, I guess the Eight Worlds is a utopia. I created her to deal with ideas that were too dark and nasty for the Eight Worlds. She's a cop, and we're always going to need cops, I believe. She deals with the nasty stuff. She lives in a universe that is an extrapolation of ours, without the intervention of an apocalyptic event like the Invasion that, of necessity, drew us together, made our inter-human differences seem trivial. Her universe is ours, more of the same, only higher-tech.
Still on the Eight Worlds: You've written three novels set in that milieu. The early one, The Ophiuchi Hotline, indicates that the human race will soon have to vacate the solar system entirely, heading into a more profound exile in deep space, but the later two, Steel Beach and The Golden Globe, step back from this narrative brink, undertaking fairly leisurely tours of the Eight Worlds and their engrossing cultural experiments. Are Steel Beach and The Golden Globe nonetheless leading up to the same Exile as The Ophiuchi Hotline, a departure involving the starship Robert A. Heinlein?
Varley: The main thing you should know about me is that I'm not a planner. I never made a timeline for the Eight Worlds; it just sort of grew. I haven't read The Ophiuchi Hotline in 20 years or more. I just keep forging on, relying on my sometimes faulty memory to keep things fairly consistent. But this is not Heinlein's Future History or Larry Niven's Known Space. When I finish a story I'm pretty much done with it; once it's published I don't go back and read it again. If this offends some readers, I'm sorry, but frankly, I haven't had many complaints. I'm quite sure there are readers out there who could plot the times and places of the Eight Worlds better than I can, and I only hope they didn't have to do too much fudging to make it happen.
There was such a gap between the first novel and the early stories that I felt it would be a needless handicap to go back and try to make everything square when I returned to the series with Steel Beach. My interests and my outlook had changed in the meantime, and I only set it and The Golden Globe in the Eight Worlds because I was comfortable there. What I wanted to do, though, was what I usually do, which is explore a character.
That said, the third in the non-trilogy that I've come to call the Metal Set, Irontown Blues, will deal with humans leaving the solar system at last. If I can ever get around to it.
Steel Beach and The Golden Globe are long, absorbing, future-biographical novels, one about a news reporter, the other about an itinerant actor. Both books, even as they evoke the fairly distant future in teeming, fascinating detail, also recall the American past: pre-World War II newspapers, the Golden Age of Hollywood and so on. Why this simultaneous, Janus-faced, prospection and retrospection?
Varley: Because I like those old movies. The Metal Set deals with people who have jobs I find interesting: reporter, actor and, in the third one, policeman turned private investigator. So the identification with Hollywood movies was deliberate. I hope to introduce an atmosphere of The Big Sleep or Chinatown into the last one.
Your introduction to "Air Raid" in the Reader is an amusing, if resigned, account of your own personal involvement with Hollywood: the filming of "Air Raid" as Millennium. What do you see as the major obstacles to the successful adaptation of SF to film? And how do you assess the current state of SF cinema generally?
Varley: SF has been the dominant genre in movies since Star Wars, which I loved. Since then, most of it has been crap. On the other hand, every once in a while a gem emerges, such as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind this year. The major obstacles to making good SF movies are the same obstacles facing any good movie. They are usually the result of competing interests, of a lot of people working together, not always toward the same goal. It doesn't even have to involve people who are actively trying to dumb it down, but if you've seen the process of endless rewrites and last-minute changes, you'll know that the miracle is that any good films get made. It comes down to power, and vision, and determination, in about equal parts. Charlie Kaufman has the vision, and after a string of critical and financial hits, some of the power, to get a movie like Eternal Sunshine made the way he wants it. Jim Carrey has the power to make final decisions on the script, and if he shares Kaufman's vision, then that's the way it will be done. The last part is determination, and you wouldn't believe how much of that is needed on the part of all concerned in a project that may stretch over three or four or five or even 10 years. It's so easy just to get frustrated and go with the studio bean counters.
A short while ago, I mentioned Robert Heinlein. A lot of your work pays implicit tribute to his style, sensibility and technique. What is it about Heinlein that makes him such a central inspiration for you, and for SF in general? Do you all the same differ with Heinlein, in particular regarding ideology, his right-wing libertarianism?
Varley: Robert Heinlein is the Shakespeare of hard science fiction. Whatever idea you have, you will find that Heinlein was there before you. During the '40s and '50s he pretty much wrote the book, so to speak, on planetary exploration and star travel. About the only method I can't recall him using was the space elevator, but I'm sure he would have written a good novel about it if he'd had the chance.
I have political disagreements with Heinlein. He was of a military background, which I can't relate to at all, and at times he was something of a knee-jerk anti-communist. My feeling is that true communism has never been practiced, least of all in the "communist" regimes. I'm not a communist, but I feel the best model for government is a balance between capitalism and socialism. Heinlein was also a bit of a social Darwinist. I prefer to give the weaker members of society help here and there.
But the root of his politics was the libertarian ideal of the government leaving us alone except when there is an overriding need. We agree completely there.
Your recent novel, Red Thunder, is among other things an Heinlein homage, a spectacular retelling of the basic scenario of Heinlein's own Rocketship Galileo (1947). Can the famous "Heinlein juveniles" still inspire? Does manned space travel, in its current cautious, even moribund, state, require a fresh inspiration, a Heinleinian jolt?
Varley: You'd have to ask a teenager if the classic Heinlein juveniles can still inspire. They are certainly dated, and that could make a difference. It's hard to keep in mind that the 1950s are as remote to this generation as 1900 is to me, and I don't read a lot of books written in 1900. However, they are still as good as they ever were, and I know there are kids out there who still read quality fiction, or J.K. Rowling wouldn't be a billionaire. So I hope they are still being read.
I hope that manned space travel has already received the kick in the ass it needs, in the form of Burt Rutan. Combined with the bucks of Paul Allen and the business sense and charisma of Richard Branson, I think they add up to the equivalent of Delos Harriman in Heinlein's "The Man Who Sold the Moon" (1950). I was there in Mojave the day Spaceship One claimed the Ansari Prize, and to me it was as exciting as John Glenn's flight.
My prescription for manned space flight? First, decommission NASA. That's right. NASA was the "can-do" part of government in the '60s, but now it's just government, as in bureaucracy. I would replace it with an agency which reviewed proposals from private companies and supplied federal funding to the ones that looked promising. Leave the spy stuff to the Air Force, leave the communications satellites to industry, which is doing a pretty good job, leave the building of big dumb booster rockets to Boeing and Lockheed and others. For manned space flight, encourage the people with a dream, like Rutan. I think we will find that the biggest stimulus to man in space will be ... tourism! Look how many have already signed up for the Rutan/Branson space hops, even at those outrageous prices. What we need is somebody to develop scramjet technology, ground to orbit and return, throwing nothing away as you go. They tested one about a hundred miles from me a few weeks ago, and it reached Mach 11 or something like that.
You're writing a sequel to Red Thunder. What will it be called?
Varley: Tentative title is Red Lightning. Yes, I know that lightning is supposed to come before thunder, but I wasn't thinking [of a] sequel when I wrote it. Now I want to provide a continuity (there may be a third), and it was either go with colors or weather. If I named it Green Thunder or Yellow Thunder people would say I was imitating Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars series. So, looks like I'm stuck with it. And any way you look at it, it's better than Red Low Pressure Area.
Your next published novel will be Mammoth, due out in mid-2005. This features the rebirth of the eponymous prehistoric species. In exploring this theme, do you concur with the sentiments of the Jurassic Park films, or is your vision different, more complex?
Varley: Actually, I don't remember much about Jurassic Park except the T. Rex chewing up the SUV. That was cool. Oh, yeah, and the lawyer being plucked out of the porta-potty and swallowed whole. Even cooler. The mammoths in my book aren't cloned. I can't say a lot more without giving away too much.
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