The John Varley Reader by John Varley Read Free Book Online Page A

I think. If only to shut up Adagio.
    Why are we going? I’ve thought about it a long time. Not because of old Lester. I hate to speak unkindly of him, but he was inarguably a fool. A fool with dignity, and the strength of his convictions; a likable old fool, but a fool all the same. It would be silly to talk of “carrying on his dream” or some of the things I think Halo has in mind.
    But, coincidentally, his dream and mine are pretty close, though for different reasons. He couldn’t bear to see the Nearside abandoned out of fear, and he feared the new human society. So he became a hermit. I want to go there simply because the fear is gone for my generation, and it’s a lot of beautiful real estate. And we won’t be alone. We’ll be the vanguard, but the days of clustering in the Farside warrens and ignoring Old Earth are over. The human race came from Earth, and it was ours until it was taken from us. To tell the truth, I’ve been wondering if the aliens are really as invincible as the old stories say.
    It sure is a pretty planet. I wonder if we could go back?

INTRODUCTION TO “Overdrawn at the Memory Bank”
    First stories by writers you admire can be an embarrassment. Isaac Asimov’s first was not very good. Theodore Sturgeon’s was okay, and hinted of greatness to come. But often the best thing you can say about them is that they show promise. Rarely does someone come along like Robert Heinlein, whose first story, “Lifeline,” seems the work of a fully formed professional. I am not ashamed of the story you just read, but when I look at it now I see hundreds of things I wish I could do over. I think it is significant that no one has ever wanted to reprint it in an anthology.
    I already mentioned that my first attempt at a novel, Gas Giant, was a disaster. That’s okay; I just read Heinlein’s unpublished first novel, soon to be in print, and it was even worse than mine. My chief regret is that Gas Giant was the basis for many of my stories to come. It told the tale of how alien beings from a giant planet like Jupiter invaded our solar system. Their purposes were mostly incomprehensible to us, but the one thing we did get was that these invaders viewed aquatic mammals like dolphins and whales as the only intelligent species on the third planet. Humans were despoiling their environment, thus it became necessary to evict and/or exterminate us. They killed billions, but couldn’t be bothered to completely wipe us out, so humanity survived and eventually thrived on the junk planets like Mercury, Venus, Luna, and Mars.
    At the outset I had very little idea that Gas Giant would become the basis for the stories I would eventually call “The Eight Worlds.”
    I had always been a compulsive reader, and I read mostly science fiction. I still am a compulsive reader, but during my hippie years I was not. I’m not sure why. Part of it was that I was sometimes too high to deal with words on paper, but I was not a steady or heavy drug user. We didn’t watch TV, either. Didn’t even own one for many years. I completely missed Star Trek, and have never regretted it. I read some of the standard texts by the gurus of the sixties, found them to be mostly dreck. My main artistic pursuit at the time was making films on an old Bolex 8 mm camera. The rest of my time was divided between scrambling for a living, dodging the draft, attending the occasional protest march in Berkeley (and always leaving when the tear gas started to fly), and just having fun. Being a hippie, somehow, was a full-time job.
    Then one day while I was casting around for a means of livelihood that didn’t involve holding my hand out to strangers, I found a secondhand copy of a book called Ringworld, by Larry Niven. It blew me away. There had been some exciting changes in science fiction since I graduated high school in the Nederland, Texas, Class of ’65.
    I had been aware of the