Science Fiction from the 1970's (the far right's kryptonite) ... Episode 1: John Varley's "Picnic on Nearside"

OR, the casualness of transsexuality, and why you aren't even ready for 1974 ...

It's really important to know that the creator of the modern techno-thriller, Tom Clancy, considered John Varley to be "the best writer in America."

Why?

Because it's important to remember that there was a time when a conservative like Clancy (who would nonetheless be called a RINO today) could appreciate the imagination and verve of a writer like Varley, who was certainly about as far away from Clancy on the political spectrum as it was possible to be. 

That time is not today. Reading John Varley would almost certainly cause any elected GOP leader or conservative journalist/clown to have a brain aneurysm and then call Moms for Liberty to ensure nobody under the age of 65 ever got to read his books again.

Fortunately, the Tucker Carlsons and Christopher Rufos of the nation have no chance against Varley.

He started writing SF in 1974, with the publication of the short story "Picnic on Nearside," which I will get to in a minute. I read it first as a high school junior. By 1979 he had performed a trifecta that few others in the field have achieved, winning the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards for the novella "The Persistence of Vision," about a self-sustaining society populated exclusively by people both blind and deaf.

He's won the Hugo three times, the Nebula twice, and the Locus ten times. His "Eight Worlds" stories, his Gaean Trilogy, and his Thunder and Lightning trilogy are undisputed classics, and exist in entirely too many copies for the book banners to ever manage to eradicate them.

But it all started in 1974 with "Picnic on Paradise," which is possibly the most important part.

It was his first published short story, and far from his best work. It's important to keep that in mind, because John Varley started so far ahead of the pack that he never had to look back over his shoulder. The casual barrage of concepts he threw off in that inaugural story was as breathtaking then as it would be considered "woke," "grooming," and "degenerate" today; I think he knows that and is proud of it.

Yet to explain this I must digress again. (I'll get to the story, I promise.)

By 1974 I had already read Ursula LeGuin's award-winning "The Left Hand of Darkness" (1969) that dealt with a race of humans on a distant planet who literally changed gender as the year cycled.

I had already consumed Robert A. Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land" (1961 -- one of the clear antecedents of the "Free Love" movement of the 1960s); "Farnham's Freehold" (1964 -- one of the first post-apocalyptic SF novels with enough sex and racial politics thrown in to keep any conservative unhappy); "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" (1966 -- with a society based on polyamorous group and "line" marriages); "I Will Fear No Evil" (1970 -- a wealthy but dying man has his mind transplanted into the body of a beautiful young woman and ... eventually ... uses a sperm bank to impregnate himself with his own seed); and "Time Enough For Love" (1973 -- in which humanity's only immortal gets so bored that he uses a time machine to go back to pre-World War I Missouri so that he can meet his own mother and have sex with her while his younger self is asleep somewhere nearby).

I had already struggled with Samuel R. Delany's early sexually-charged shorter fiction like "Aye, and Gomorrah, Too" (1967); "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones" (1968); and "They Fly at Ciron" (1971; with James Sallis) in which chemically induced asexuality, compulsive self-harm, and battlefield atrocity were interwoven with LGBTQIA+ (and several other letters besides) themes.

I'd plodded through early Barry Malzberg (the density of his writing was difficult for me), recognizing even as I was not particularly entertained that "Final War" (1968 -- atrocity and exploitation); "What Time Was That?" (1969 -- time travel and suicide); and "In the Pocket" (1970 -- cancer, rage, and possibly murder) were important.

There was so much more. But the 1960s and early 1970s were really the first heavy throes of SF dealing with who we are as sexual human beings, and the kinds of atrocities and grandiosities we as mostly hairless apes can perform.

But in his first short story John Varley just waltzed right past the pack into entirely new places.

Varley had earlier written what he admits was an unpublishable novel called "Gas Giant" in which aliens almost casually invaded and appropriated Earth, forcing the remnants of humanity to eke out survival on the other "Eight Worlds" of the Solar System (Pluto was still a world back then), most notably on the Moon. "Gas Giant" is forever lost (I'm willing to bet Varley burned it rather than let anybody else read it), but he set multiple stories in that "Eight Worlds" universe, of which "Picnic on Nearside" was the very first.

The story is set on Luna, where the narrator/protagonist named Fox, whose mom is Carnival -- "We don't get along well most of the time, and I think it's because I'm twelve and she's ninety-six." The other two main characters are Fox's best friend Halo, and the old guy they meet on Nearside named Lester (who doesn't really concern me here).

As the story opens, Fox and Carnival are fighting because Fox wants to get a sex change, and Carnival thinks he's too young:

The major topic of debate around our warren for seven or eight lunations had been the Change I wanted to get. The battle lines had been drawn, and we had been at it every day. She thought a Change would harm my mind at my age. Everybody was getting one. 

We were all sitting at the breakfast table. There was me and Carnival, and Chord, the man Carnival has lived with for several years, and Adagio, Chord's daughter. Adagio is seven. There had been a big battle the night before between me and Carnival. It had ended up (more or less) with me promising to divorce her as soon as I was of age. I don't remember what the counterthreat was. I had been pretty upset. 

I was sitting there eating fitfully and licking my wounds. The argument had been inconclusive, philosophically, but from the pragmatic standpoint she had won, no question about it. The hard fact was that I couldn't get a Change until she affixed her personality index to the bottom of a sheet of input, and she said she'd put her brain in cold storage before she'd allow that. She would, too. 

"I think I'm ready to have a Change," Carnival said to us. 

"That's not fair!" I yelled. "You said that just to spite me. You just want to rub it in that I'm nothing and you're anything you want to be." 

"We'll have no more of that," she said, sharply. "We've exhausted this subject, and I will not change my mind. You're too young for a Change." 

"Blowout," I said. "I'll be an adult soon; it's only a year away. Do you really think I'll be all that different in a year?" 

"I don't care to predict that. I hope you'll mature. But if, as you say, it's only a year, why are you in such a hurry?"

You're following all this, right? Next thing that happens is a visitor comes to the door:

An hour later, in the depths of my depression, the door rang. It was a woman I had never seen before. She was nude. 

You know how sometimes you can look at someone you know who's just had a Change and recognize them instantly, even though they might be twenty centimeters shorter or taller and mass fifty kilos more or less and look nothing at all like the person you knew? Maybe you don't, because not everyone has this talent, but I have it very strong. Carnival says it's an evolutionary change in the race, a response to the need to recognize other individuals who can change their appearance at will. That may be true; she can't do it at all. 

I think it's something to do with the way a person wears a body: any body, of either sex. Little mannerisms like blinking, mouth movements, stance, fingers; maybe even the total kinesthetic gestalt the doctors talk about. This was like that. I could see behind the pretty female face and the different height and weight and recognize someone I knew. It was Halo, my best friend, who had been a male the last time I saw him, three lunes ago. She had a big foolish grin on her face. 

"Hi, Fox," she said, in a voice that was an octave higher and yet was unmistakably Halo's. "Guess who?" 

"Queen Victoria, right?" I tried to sound bored. "Come on in, Halo." 

Her face fell. She came in, looking confused. 

"What do you think?" she said, turning slowly to give me a look from all sides. All of them were good because—as if I needed anything else—her mother had let her get the full treatment: fully developed breasts, all the mature curves—the works. She had been denied only the adult height. She was even a few centimeters shorter than she had been. 

"It's fine," I said. 

"Listen, Fox, if you'd rather I left..." 

"Oh, I'm sorry, Halo," I said, giving up on my hatred. "You look great. Fabulous. Really you do. I'm just having a hard time being happy for you. Carnival is never going to give in." 

She was instantly sympathetic. She took my hand, startling me badly. 

"I was so happy I guess I was tactless," she said in a low voice. "Maybe I shouldn't have come over here yet."

Fox and Halo will go on to have lots of sex, and Fox (looking back) will tell us about how it would be later when he had changed into a woman and Halo had changed back into a man (I say "man" and "woman" because they were both by then over the age of majority, which in the future Varley thought would be age thirteen).

Fox will even tell us about how he'd already had one Change that he couldn't remember, having been born female, but Carnival deciding in the first few hours that she couldn't handle raising a girl this year and having Fox converted into a boy. (I guess at age 86 at the time Carnival could have been forgiven her moods, and it made sex with her offspring easier to her old-fashioned mind when Fox got old enough for them to sleep together.)

I figure that if any current right wingers are still reading this their heads have already exploded.

Varley's concept of transsexuality in 1974 was actually deeply at odds with our current understanding of internal sexual identity. He saw switching back from male to female and vice versa as no more significant in our future than changing make-up or clothes. In his future, it seems to me, nobody had an inherent, pre-determined sexuality, and everybody had the capacity to be anything and everything.

(By the way, if you thought this was pretty far out, especially for 1974, that only proves you haven't read either "The Barbie Murders" or the Gaean Trilogy, where things sexual really get weird while we spend three books dealing with a sentient moon that has gone, unfortunately, senile.)

Yet there really is intention if not method to my insanity.

Except for those today who read SF and LGBTQIA+ fiction (a field that, right wing Mrs Grundy aside, is exploding in popularity), we have somehow between the 1980s and now become a rather strident, humorless, unimaginative lot who are scared ... of ideas.

I read "Picnic on Nearside" as a high school junior, as I said earlier, not because I found it in the school library, but because I had a paid subscription to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. So I didn't have to go find it there. But it WAS there -- the library had a subscription and it was one of the most popular magazines in the stacks (which was why I went and got my own subscription -- you could never get that single copy).

And nobody gave a fuck.

We read John Varley as mind-expanding entertainment, but it certainly never prompted me to want either to get a sex change myself or to wonder how my best friend Eddie would have looked as a girl (I do not think Eddie would have looked good with big breasts unless they also did something about that overbite.)

But we were also completely un-phased when tennis player Renee Richards was outed as transsexual in 1977 by ... I can't make this stuff up ... Tucker Carlson's father, Richard. 

I think it probably explains A LOT about the race-hustling buffoon to know that he must have had his own puberty seriously delayed by discovering that transsexuals were hiding among us around the time of his 8th birthday. He's arguably been scared that somebody who's not white will one day hold him down and excise his pee-pee every since.

We didn't give a fuck about Halo's sex changes or any of the rest of the wild, gender-bending sex being explored by SF writers and even more mainstream authors like Philip Roth, whose 1971 novel "Our Gang" satirized the current GOP wet dream by not only declaring fetuses to be human beings but giving them the right to vote.

We didn't give a fuck because we had an imagination, ideas did not threaten us, and we wanted to explore the possibilities of human potential.

By the way, nearly every book I have mentioned here (with the possible exceptions of "Our Gang," "Final War," and "Time Enough for Love" that I can't remember) were in the fucking high school library, and ANYBODY from the 8th grade on up could just walk in a check them out.

The drinking age was also eighteen, we all smoked weed (ok, not you, Lin Thompson, at least not too much if I recall correctly), a lot of us tried acid (some liked it more than others), and we read about the "bladder totem" in Tom Wolfe's "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" (1968) or about Chief Broom's delusions that he was really small and the night orderlies masturbated over him in Ken Kesey's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" (1962).

We weren't such humorless, scared prigs as those like Ron "Don't Say Gay" DeSantis, Sarah "Don't Say Latinx" Huckabee Sanders, or Christopher "Don't admit the nation was never good to Black people" Rufo who aspire to control our nation's future.

(Entirely arbitrary aside: I can never type "Rufo" without grinning and remembering that Rufo was the name Robert Heinlein gave to the ugly sidekick in his novel "Glory Road." Having your name associated with a famous author who wrote about people traveling back in time to commit incest with their mom while their earlier self night be watching must make little Christopher proud --or at least as erect as the prospect of eviscerating New College makes him.)

But here's the thing: there are STILL more of us than there are of them. The sales of SF and other weird fiction tells me that. The people I meet tell me that.

The assholes who want to put the Scarlet Letter on us all are themselves taking a wide stance in the public restrooms, having abortions, and watching more porn than people on the left.

They're fucking scared of ideas. And if they don't win in the next few years they won't win at all.

So we just have to hang on.

And read more kinky science fiction (I heartily recommend Derek Kunsken's "The Quantum Magician" -- the audiobook verison by preference).

By the way, if you think this is an attitude I've only come to recently, you might want to read this -- "The Fringe" from my old Delaware Libertarian blog back in 2009. I haven't changed a bit. It's the rest of you who have gotten stale.

And, oh, yes, I am this vulgar. If you don't appreciate it, you know where to find the door.