John Varley's Eight-Worlds Essay by Doug Eigsti
John Varley likes to play in his own backyard. Most of his fiction is set in one of two futures. To date, he has devoted three novels and seventeen short-stories to the Eight-Worlds series, depending on how you look at them (see below). He set three other novels inside the living world Gaea. Apart from that, his work not tied to either of these series comprises two novels and seventeen stories. His writing career was jump-started with the Eight-Worlds short-story Picnic on Nearside, and it is back to the Eight-Worlds that he most frequently returns. He dazzled the Sci-Fi world in the mid 1970's with a phalanx of Eight-Worlds short stories that permeated nearly every best-of-the-year-collection and awards ballot. The first was published in 1974 and the last in 1979. I was privileged to witness this Varley phenomenon and still eagerly await each new Eight-Worlds story knowing the inspiration it draws upon.
Shock Value
Varley's Eight-Worlds is at the same time one of the most shocking and outlandish future histories and one of the most engaging and endearing. He is aptly able to combine his fondness for setting conventions on their head with an empathy for his miscreant characters. It may be this that is most shocking about his work. One can approach Varley with an aversion to deviant sexual practices and yet be able to relate to Varley's gender bending characters without batting an eye; for within Varley's realm all is sensible and inevitable.
Even the society of the EW considers Cloning to be so dangerous that it must be tightly regulated, but so useful that it cannot be abandoned entirely. The prospect of prolonging our consciousness is so enticing that the risks are a necessary evil. We can identify with this conflict because we are even now are engaged in the public debate over Cloning. We can thank Varley for providing us with some of the best reasons to avoid tampering with this technology. He also gets the credit for some of the most memorable and thought provoking stories on the subject. TOH stands as one of the truly great Cloning novels, with the protagonist Lilo carrying the story in three different incarnations simultaneously.
Changing
Considering that it was Varley's first Eight-Worlds story, Picnic on Nearside expresses his vision remarkably well. The social impact of sex-Changing is fully formed and functioning at the advanced level of third or fourth generation changers. Society too has been transformed, not only by the alien Invasion, but be Changing which has rocked every gender role and radically altered the family unit.
In the pivotal EW story Options the main character Cleo explores the new fad of sex Changing. Her husband Jules is reluctant to join her in this gender journey, preferring to stick with the body he was born with, and the roles that come with it and define his identity. Due to Varley's subtle empathy for his characters the reader bonds with Cleo despite her perversion and Jules is seen to be unreasonable and out of touch. Had Varley not been able to pull the reader into his sex-Changing society with a large degree of acceptance, the impact of the rest of the saga would have been muffled. Magically the reader is able to relate to Cleo. His logic is sound. viz....If technology were able to offer quick and genuine sex changes, the repercussions on marital roles would be seismic, just as it was for Cleo and Jules. So many of our roles are based on the pragmatism of gender function. Of course we accept our roles as part of God's grand design. Men are physically bigger and stronger, women bear and suckle children. Speculating what the world would be like with the technology of easy Changing (and granting the absence of God as the supreme moral being) one inevitably arrives at one much like Varley describes.
How much of you is hormones, genetics, and how much environment, upbringing? Christians believe that we will someday know what it is like to not have any male or female, husband or wife distinctions, for scripture tells us that in the heavenly realm there is no distinction between male and female. Varley has unwittingly hit upon the ultimate end for the Christian members of humanity. It is a subject that he returns to frequently, exploring this sexual side of all of us knowing that we can all relate in some way to the subject.
It is insightful to note that Options (1979) was among the last two EW stories to be written. (Only 1980's Beatnik Bayou was later.) So after TOH was done Varley recognized that he had not dealt with the issues that would inevitably stem from such a pervasive capability as quick and easy sex Changing. The message here is that while it may easy to undergo the procedure, the repercussions on a personal level will be difficult and disruptive. That insight is what was needed for the EW and just what Options added. When reading the EW series now it is natural that Options be among the first stories to read (its internal chronology places it at 100OE), but early fans to the series didn't get to it until after having digested the capstone novel TOH.
The Phantom of Kansas (TPK)
This story is the core of the EW. It nimbly incorporates the fundamental themes of Memory Recording and Cloning. The protagonist Fox undergoes the pain, not of physical death, even though he is repeatedly murdered, but of loss due to losing that part of himself due to Memory Recording. Fox enjoys a standard of living that she earned by creating works of art, but she had not even thought of these works at the time of her last Memory Recording. And to add to the irony, it is jealousy over those ark works that incite her killer, who is a clone of Fox. This story demonstrates what a Pandora's Box these technologies would unleash, but it does not read like a cautionary tale. It is upbeat throughout, almost whimsical at the end when Fox and his serial-killer-clone become lovers and fly off to Pluto as the CC, winking at the anti-cloning laws, lets them go.
The Ophiuchi Hotline
The Ophiuchi Hotline is the end of Varley's Eight-Worlds series. This novel exploits the possibilities of the two complementary technologies, Memory Recording and Cloning. Both are necessary to achieve a form of non-linear consciousness that is instrumental to the development of his pseudo-immortality theme. Varley likes to explore the implications on society of dramatic technological changes. Varley asks the question, "What if we could record a personality and play it into a clone"? Would the new clone be different from an original that had lived through the same experiences?
Varley assumes The Ophiuchi Hotline reader to be well versed in the alterations foisted upon humanity by exotic technology. The Varley reader will have already been exposed to these concepts in earlier Eight-Worlds stories. In fact it is essential that readers of the Eight-Worlds become accustomed to the societal changes brought on by just a handful of key technologies. To the uninitiated reader the novels of the series will not have the intended impact because the reader will be dwelling on the technological trappings that so pervade them, and will miss the nuances of insight he has to offer on the human condition.
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Varley's suite of technologies
Memory recording
Overdrawn at the Memory Bank
The Phantom of Kansas.
Goodbye Robinson Crusoe*
Beatnik Bayou
Cloning
Retrograde Summer
Lollipop and the Tar Baby
The Phantom of Kansas.
Goodbye Robinson Crusoe*
Beatnik Bayou
Options
Overdrawn at the Memory Bank
Changing
Options
The Phantom of Kansas.
Beatnik Bayou
Picnic on Nearside
Retrograde Summer
Symb
Amputee
Gotta Sing, Gotta Dance
Equinoctial
The Black Hole Passes*
Null-Suits
The Funhouse Effect
Retrograde Summer
In the Bowl
*Implied
These five technologies, along with the idea that mankind has been exiled from Earth by Invaders, define the Eight-Worlds. But these stories are so much more than mere hard-science extrapolation of technology. Varley has conceived of such a rich setting that often these fall into the background, overshadowed by the individual concerns of the characters. It is as if Varley has spent so much quality time exploring the Eight-Worlds himself that he can transcend the differences to our world and expose us to the human stories that arise there, rather than just scratch the surface of the technologies themselves. Strangely this gives his stories a familiar realism, populated though they are by people that change sex as flippantly, and easily, as we change hairstyles. Varley's people are still people we can relate to despite their immersion in exotic technology. And this is Varley's appeal, that he can incorporate many traditional science-fiction trappings and still manage to draw our focus to the human angle. His vision of the future becomes a celebration of humanity rather than what could have become a melancholy account of our vagabond race cast adrift from our home planet. Varley's people thrive in exile, adopting the unwanted planted as their home.
The Ophiuchi Hotline was written as the capstone of the Eight-Worlds series. And no matter how you tally the stories included in that series (See AEW below), it is the end. Published in 1977, just three years after the first Eight-Worlds story (Picnic on Nearside) The Ophiuchi Hotline wraps the series up in an abrupt fashion. Clearly Varley had conceived the end of the series from the beginning, and as enjoyable as The Ophiuchi Hotline is, once the end is reached it is somehow less than satisfying, but rather leaves the reader wanting to return to explore more of the golden age of mankind on all the planets of the Solar system apart from Earth. The Ophiuchi Hotline abandons its namesake Eight Worlds for parts unknown.
In the Ophiuchi Hotline we are finally exposed firsthand, to the invasion of Earth and are given some idea of the catastrophic impact on human society. We learn of population thinning lotteries that were imposed to ration limited resources in the years following the Occupation of Earth. The purpose of the Ophiuchites is revealed (they want our culture), and we are cautioned that the next inevitable step in human exile is banishment from the entire Solar system not just Earth.
In most Eight-Worlds stories neither the Invaders nor the Hotline play a significant role. Varley instead devotes his energies to exploring the implications of being cast off the home-world or the impact on the human psyche of hotline technologies such as cloning and memory recording. The daily lives of the citizens of the Eight-Worlds is consumed with mundane concerns and not with the incomprehensible motives of the invaders or the inscrutable purposes of the Hotline in dispensing technical information to us. The average citizen has left behind Earth and moved on to the new life that has been forced upon humanity without giving these underlying causes much thought. The EW is an optimistic place, a golden age of opportunity where working is optional. People are free to persue their avocations. In this the novel The Ophiuchi Hotline differs, for its plot is closely tied to both the invasion of Earth and with the Hotline. Of the short-stories, only Picnic on Nearside carries the dread of the Invaders as a theme. TOH is driven by the Free-Earther Boss Tweed and his monomaniacal obsession to win back the home planet. Lilo (in all her incarnations) is buffeted about by Tweed's machinations to get back at the Invaders. Lilo is more characteristic of the other EW protagonists in that she is pursuing her career as a geneticist, not for money, but because this is what she enjoys doing. In other circumstances she might have had a fulfilling life full of love and happiness. In this novel adventure is thrust upon her. Unfortunately she will not be allowed to triumph because her time is up. The Invaders are about to expel mankind from the Solar system.
In this novel the Hotline is a critical factor to unfolding events. At the novel's end the Ophiuchites quickly expose us to the grand scheme of the universe, wherein humanity is classified in the third caste of races, relegated to wandering the void in search of a safe harbor. Varley tries to give it an upbeat ending with Lilo heading for the stars and seemingly endless possibilities. But the reader is left with a sense of loss of those halcyon days where we plied the backwaters of the Solar system eeking out an existence far from the scrutiny of the Invaders. As odd as that life was, it has acquired a sentimental value that no subsequent future can possibly equal. Perhaps Varley too feels the same, for he returns time and again to populate the Eight-Worlds with new stories and characters. He has yet to give any account of events after the final exile, after The Ophiuchi Hotline. The Eight-Worlds is something special, calling back both the reader and the writer to wiggle our toes on the steel beaches of mankind’s artificial homelands.
Alternate Eight-Worlds (AEW)
Based on the setting of Varley's newer Eight-Worlds novels (comprising what he has called his "Metal Trilogy"), Steel Beach and The Golden Globe (with Irontown Blues next), it appears that Varley is recasting the Eight-Worlds mold to eliminate the Hotline altogether. Neither of these novels refer to the Hotline even indirectly; in fact, technologies (such as Null-suits) that in earlier stories are attributed to the Hotline are said to be either human developments, or inventions of the Central Computer (itself a human development). It seems that Varley's original vision for the Eight-Worlds was too alienating even for him; preferring instead to delve deeper into the familiar and more hospitable nursery of the Solar system. For this reason I have decided to categorize His Metal Trilogy, and the Anna-Louise Bach stories which have overlapping characters, as Alternate Eight-Worlds stories, off of the main sequence. The Jonbar point for the divergence being sometime well before the invasion. These AEW stories share the mood of the Metal Trilogy in that the culture of Luna is quite baroque, not the austere conservatism of the EW. In TOH Lilo is shocked at the extravagant disneylands and public areas on Pluto, but in the ALB stories, which are certainly pre-invasion, we are treated to the lavish Mozartplatz. In TOH (chapter 13) Lilo is offended by Pluto's waste and frivolity. What would she think about the Luna of ALB, which is supposedly in her own past? The issue is that these differences in some of the stories can either be attributed to the writer's carelessness (something to which Varley himself confesses in the afterward to Steel Beach) or to a marked revision of Varley's version of the future he is writing in. Since all the inconsistencies in the EW stories neatly fall out in to two categories, either Hotline or no-Hotline, I prefer to view these stories as belonging to each other as parts of two closely parallel timelines. In fact the stories that do not mention the Hotline I consider to belong to both the EW and the AEW (sort of a shared universe). Note too, that since Varley wrote the ALB story Blue Champagne in 1981 he has not returned to write any stories set in the EW where the Hotline exists. So it seems that the evidence rests in favor of the revisionist view of Varley's future history, one where Varley himself, whether deliberately or not, has adopted a different version of the future in which to populate his stories; a view where the Hotline has no place. Perhaps he prefers to see mankind as more inventive in shaping the future rather than being manipulated by an infusion of technology from the Ophiuchites. (A pitiful race if there ever was one. A race needing our culture to give themselves back their joie de vivre lost in so many generations of interstellar exile running from the invaders.) Regardless of their origins in either scenario Varley's extrapolation of the impact these technologies would have on human society would be the same, or perhaps he now envisions a more optimistic view of mankind's eventual end. Instead of becoming wandering Gypsies like the rest of the third-class races of the galaxy, maybe Varley now sees man as survivors, thriving in the artificial worlds not wanted by the Invaders that they are relegated to. Add to that the fact that the newer AEW stories are the best he has written and the conclusion I come to is that Varley himself prefers to play in the AEW over the eight worlds that include the Hotline. This new vision has certainly revitalized the series. It is only this new foresight that gave the inspiration that resulted in his best work to date Steel Beach and The golden Globe). One can hardly imagine that they would have been as fine if they were set in the post-Hotline universe. No these AEW stories truly carry the torch for the series. I see them as the core of Varley's opus.
The Metal Trilogy
It was with Steel Beach that Varley reached the pinnacle of his opus. In this finely crafted novel he reaches a synthesis of the bright spots from the EW and focuses them poignantly to sear us with thoughts of our mortality and how that relates to the motives behind suicide, all the while keeping us entertained and laughing; for this a very funny novel. This novel amazingly transcends the already fascinating themes from the EW, and deftly elevates his suite of technologies to become the foundation of a substantial and towering work.
Thematically Steel Beach (SB) carries the concepts of the story The Phantom of Kansas (TPK) to new levels of richness. Where TPK gives us a foray into Memory Recording and Cloning and how the stream of human consciousness is both truncated (by the death of the original Fox) and preserved (by the Clones of Fox) in a fast paced and ingeniously plotted story, Steel Beach uses this background suite of technologies, and the reader's intimate familiarity with their ramifications, to much more thoroughly engage the reader in the character of Hildy so that we may have some emotional attachment when she begins to battle a death-wish buried deep within her.
In both the earlier TPK and SB the Central Computer (The CC) plays a pivotal role, but it is only in SB that it endears itself to the reader. As the ubiquitous overseer of the mundane functions of society such as law enforcement, and in the role as the secret personal companion of every living person The CC reaches the point where it has to make decisions it was never programmed for. As judge, jury and executioner it has had to come up with its own code of conduct and rules of operation that allow it to deal with issues that affect the lives of the people it was designed to serve. We first see this in TPK when The CC lets Fox and her serial-murderer-clone Phantom get away with murder. Of course the case is complicated by the fact that the murderer and victim share the same genetic code and memories; not to mention that they have since fallen in love and no longer wish to file charges. In this short form The CC serves as little more than a plot device. The turmoil going on within its circuits is not dealt with. But in the longer SB The CC takes on a persona as real as any human character, torn by conflicts of interest to the point of suicidal tendencies. Most fascinating is that The CC recognizes these tendencies and sets about to uncover their cause and hopefully a cure. It comes up with an experiment where it tests destructive personalities by reviving people that have killed themselves, even though this is contrary to its programmed guidelines. The survival, not of just the main character Hildy is at stake, but the survival of humanity itself. This book is an unexpected treat. Of course we as Varley fans have come to expect a fun read, full of shocking twists and ingenious technology. The surprise is that Varley could give us all that and make us think desperate thoughts about our mortality without losing any of the humor. This is a book not to be missed, but don't think that it can be fully appreciated without first having the other earlier EW stories under the belt. Varley will assume that the reader knows the milieu of the EW and has a grasp of the way society has been altered by technology before commencing into the expanded themes of SB.
SB is followed, both sequentially and thematically, by The Golden Globe (TGG). Set in the same AEW environment TGG plays deep into the character of Sparky, a repertory actor in search of himself in the off-Broadway stages of the lesser planets. Here Varley effectively utilizes the flashback to both reveal the influences that form Sparky's life and to conceal the cause to his problems, which are ironically very closely related. Again Varley proves his fondness to the AEW realm of human resourcefulness by showing us a heretofore undisclosed segments of society. We see the seedy underworld side of the EW and also the elite leisure class. And again the Hotline has no place, only human ingenuity and optimism albeit tempered with depression and frustration. But the overpowering sense of oppression and desperation over the Invaders is again absent. Mankind has graduated from such things and learned to cope with the new realities. Mankind thrives in this AEW. It has turned out to be a land of opportunity and adventure. People do not need to look back to the time on Earth as the golden age of man, but see the present age as man's finest hour.
Key:
ALB = Anna Louise Bach
CC = Central Computer
EW = Eight Worlds
AEW = Alternate Eight Worlds
SB = Steel Beach
TGG = The Golden Globe
TOH = The Ophiuchi Hotline
TPK = The Phantom of Kansas
DDE 2002, 2004
posted by Doug Eigsti at Thursday, June 10, 2004
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