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

New Wave in SF, enough to know that some of it was a pretentious waste of paper and some of it was very, very good. But I didn’t think I could write that way. I found other books by Larry, and saw that he was following in a tradition I had first encountered in junior high: the “Future History” stories of Heinlein. Niven called his future history “Known Space,” and it was populated with strange and inventive aliens, a history reaching back billions of years, and marvelous technological advances. It seemed wonderfully rigorous, and the stories were fun.
    That led me to other writers working in the same area. I realized that, since the days of the “Golden Age” writers of the forties and fifties, there had been a blizzard of astronomical discoveries, from neutron stars to quasars to colliding galaxies way, way out there, to fundamental reversals of most of our best guesses right in our own neighborhood. Mercury didn’t always keep one face turned to the sun. Venus was not a swamp planet. Mars had no canals. Jupiter had rings. There were so many exciting possibilities, and Larry Niven was taking advantage of them all to tell good old-fashioned thought-provoking tech stories.
    I can’t say that I immediately got to work mapping out a history and milieu for the Eight Worlds as I was reading the Niven stories. I had to get Gas Giant out of my system first . . . so to speak. But when that was done, I began to think about what life might be like for the survivors of the alien invasion. What kind of stories could I write about them? What would life be like for them?
    First, I decided to begin about two hundred years after the invasion. The invasion itself I had set in the far, distant future. Say . . . oh, around 2005. The moon, Luna, was the center of civilization, so many stories would be set there. But I decided to write one story on each of the different planets that made up the Eight Worlds. (I haven’t done that yet, haven’t had the time. To make a living one must write novels.) Thus, my Mercury story became “Retrograde Summer,” referring to the fact that on Mercury, the sun will sometimes set and then rise again, before finally setting for the “day,” which is very long. My Venus story was “In the Bowl,” inspired by the fact that the thickness of the atmosphere would distort light like a lens, making it appear that you were standing in a crater wherever you went.
    All that was easy. Much harder was to decide what the people would be like. What new technologies would they have? How would these new things affect human behavior? What would it be like to know that we were not the smartest or most powerful species in the galaxy, that we weren’t even a good second place?
    It was from such premises that “Picnic on Nearside” grew. Other stories followed, including this one, which I now see as a sort of early take on virtual reality. It was filmed, starring Raul Julia, and shown on PBS. I don’t think it was entirely successful, but I enjoyed it as it was the first of my works to be dramatized.

OVERDRAWN AT THE MEMORY BANK
    IT WAS SCHOOLDAY at the Kenya disneyland. Five nine-year-olds were being shown around the medico section where Fingal lay on the recording table, the top of his skull removed, looking up into a mirror. Fingal was in a bad mood (hence the trip to the disneyland) and could have done without the children. Their teacher was doing his best, but who can control five nine-year-olds?
    â€œWhat’s the big green wire do, teacher?” asked a little girl, reaching out one grubby hand and touching Fingal’s brain where the main recording wire clamped to the built-in terminal.
    â€œLupus, I told you you weren’t to touch anything. And look at you, you didn’t wash your hands.” The teacher took the child’s hand and pulled it away.
    â€œBut what does it matter? You told us yesterday that the reason no