The John Varley Reader

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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.

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Copyright Â© 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.

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PS3572.A724A6 2004
813'.54âdc22

2004050349

http://us.penguingroup.com

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.

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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 greatâhalf a block away from Golden Gate Park, one block from Haight Streetâbut 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.

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