alfway through The Golden Globe, which is John Varley's first
novel since Steel Beach (1992), I began to think I'd landed myself
in the middle of the longest shaggy dog story since Tristram Shandy (1759).
I still think so.
By the time I'd finished The Golden Globe, which is the most
exuberantly unputdownable shaggy dog story I've ever read, I began to
think I'd landed myself at the climax of just about the cleverest middle
volume of a trilogy I'd ever read.
And I continue to think that this may be the case.
We are in the universe of Steel Beach, the universe Varley
invented at the beginning of his career in the mid-1970s, and has--with
long intermissions--been refining ever since. A few hundred years before
the beginning of the tale, Old Earth has suffered an Invasion from an
unknown alien race. Everyone (with certain exceptions: their stories
appeared decades ago) on Earth has been killed, very quickly, and a No
Trespassing sign has been put up. The reason for this may be ecological:
we humans made such an appalling mess of their planet that we were
reclassified as vermin, and exterminated.
The only survivors are those who lived on the Moon, the planets
of this solar system (excluding Jupiter), and the asteroids. After 200
years the human race, no longer exilic nor traumatized by the loss of the
home planet, has begun to thrive again.
The Golden Globe is a guided tour of the new patch.
Kenneth Valentine is 100 years old. He is a superb and
quick-witted actor on the lam from a crime he seems to have committed 70
years earlier on Luna, just after he had decided to terminate his career
as "Sparky," the greatest of all TV child stars. He still works as an
actor, but is also a petty thief and con man.
Beyond the orbit of Pluto
He tells most of his story in the first person. We begin beyond
the orbit of Pluto. Sparky and his wonder dog Toby (and a ghost version
of Jimmy Stewart in the role of Elwood P. Dowd from Harvey, a movie in
which Jimmy Stewart makes friends with an imaginary six-foot rabbit)
escape from a minor imbroglio, but soon find themselves chased by a
cyborg enforcer from Charon, a planetoid inhabited by a kind of mafia
whose members subscribe to a religion for which the infliction of pain is
the highest sacrament.
Much of The Golden Globe is taken up by this chase. Only at the
end do we learn that the Charonian has been set on Sparky's trail to take
revenge for an extremely insignificant crime which has nothing to do with
the rest of the novel.
The McGuffin of The Golden Globe is not something Sparky is
chasing. It is Sparky himself.
Meanwhile, through a series of extraordinarily long and absorbing
(but once again almost completely irrelevant) flashbacks on Luna, the
entire career of Sparky the child star is recounted, down to the last
detail. Dozens of news reports and columns, some very amusing, are
included.
Sparky is the son of John Valentine, a brilliant but egomaniacal
actor/manager, who molds his son like Silly Putty into his own image;
during the years his father is off-Moon and leaves him alone, however,
the diminutive but strangely likable child star creates a vast
entertainment industry around his program, and by the age of 29, when the
murder occurs, is rich and famous.
Almost nothing about Sparky's life and career has anything but
the most glancing relationship either to the larger shaggy dog story
being told, or contains any element of SF at all.
It just sits there on the page and dazzles you.
Touring the solar system
Meanwhile, there is the solar system to tour. Like Kim Stanley
Robinson in The Memory of Whiteness and Michael Swanwick in Vacuum
Flowers, the tour moves by stages from the outermost limits of our
system to its very heart. Lots of different kinds of modes of transport
are described; various societies met on the way are limned (in a style of
exclamatory exposition that would be as hectoring as Robert A. Heinlein
in his late intolerable stacked-deck vein, except for the fact that John
Varley is a very sensible man, and most of what he says is reasonable
enough to present without cheating); and Sparky, after slingshotting
around the sun in a fabulous spaceship whose AI consciously tries to
sound like HAL from Arthur C. Clarke/Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space
Odyssey, finally arrives back on Luna, where his life began.
This has taken way over 100,000 words. If there is to be a story
here, it has not yet begun.
In almost any hands but Varley's, The Golden Globe would be
unreadable elephant plop. But it is not, of course, elephant plop. No one
could really excuse the vast flashbacks (though they are huge fun), but
the tour of the solar system does give us, almost entirely painlessly, a
huge amount of information about Varley's diaspora universe.
And it does bring us back to Luna. Sparky appears as King Lear,
in the very theatre he built at vast expense for his raving Dad, and
where, 70 years earlier...but that would be telling. It wouldn't be
telling anything the story led up to, except in the sense that The
Golden Globe did manage to get us to the church on time; but it would be giving away what happens in the courtroom after Sparky is finally
arrested (out of the blue) for a real crime.
Central to the pixillated climax of the book is Hildy Johnson,
protagonist of Steel Beach, and the starship Robert A. Heinlein, which also features in that volume. How they come together, and how Sparky's newly revealed vast fortune may well have opened the gates to a tightly-plotted final volume, it is for John Varley to tell. I think he had better.
He has wound us around his little finger for 400 pages.
But it's about time to show us he can yo-yo.
John Clute is a writer, editor, critic and scholar of science fiction. He is the author of the Illustrated Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and co-editor of both The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, all three of which earned Hugo Awards. He is also a co-founder of the Hugo-winning British SF publication Interzone. His criticism and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Omni, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and other places too numerous to list.
