Who Goes There?

When it comes to SF in the ’70s, you kinda have to talk about John Varley unless you’re one of those people who only reads novels. Varley made his debut in the August 1974 issues of F&SF and Vertex simultaneously, so this actually marks the 50th anniversary of his debut. (Those issues would’ve been on newsstands in July, but let me have this one.) So Varley pretty quickly made a name for himself as one of the most exciting new writers in the field, and for those first few years it was just with short stories. More specifically his stories about what he would call the Eight Worlds did and honestly still do read as fresh, if also products of their time to an extent. Varley would win three Hugos and two Nebulas, but none of these were for his Eight Worlds stories and indeed none of those stories won any awards, to my recollection. Not sure why. Even The Ophiuchi Hotline, Varley’s debut novel (he had apparently written one before but couldn’t get it published because it sucked), which is a pretty gnarly read and which serves as a sort of climax to those original Eight Worlds stories, only got a Locus poll spot. “Retrograde Summer” was Varley’s third published story and the second to take place in the Eight Worlds continuity; it also nabbed him his first Nebula nomination. Compared to some later entries in this series it’s on the tame side, but you can imagine reading “Retrograde Summer” in 1975 and finding it a mind-bending experience.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the February 1975 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It was then reprinted in The Best Science Fiction of the Year #5 (ed. Terry Carr), Worldmakers: SF Adventures in Terraforming (ed. Gardner Dozois), and the Varley collections The Persistence of Vision and Good-Bye, Robinson Crusoe and Other Stories. Not to flex or anything, but that latter Varley collection was a limited edition, all copies signed, and I happen to have one. Was not exactly cheap. What’s neat about The John Varley Reader and Good-Bye, Robinson Crusoe and Other Stories is that there’s zero overlap between them. “Retrograde Summer” is also one of the few stories published in F&SF to appear there twice, as it was reprinted in the June-July 2009 issue.

Enhancing Image

Perhaps it’s fitting that the first Varley story I cover here is set on the first planet in our solar system: Mercury.

Timothy is a 17-year-old aspiring pilot on Mercury, living with his mom Dorothy, has a special visitor coming in from Earth’s moon: Jubilant, his sister, whom he has never met before. Jubilant is older “by three E-years,” making her the big sister, and the two don’t exactly get along at first sight. This is all a bit of an odd experience since Timothy isn’t sure how Jubilant is his sister, and as we learn about family arrangements for this future humanity it’s hard to blame his confusion. The awkwardness isn’t helped by Jubilant’s total unfamiliarity with life on Mercury, and like other “loonies” she has to adjust to the gravitational pull of even this small planet. (“I’d hate to be a loonie; just about anywhere they go, they’re too heavy.) Mercury has not been terraformed; instead humans have adapted themselves to the planet’s incredibly harsh climate, shielding themselves from the sun through various means while also having skin-tight suits (or null-suits as they’re called in the Eight Worlds) that are basically full-body condoms. Something clever and revolutionary Varley did at the time was that he posited humans would be able to conquer the solar system, not through terraforming that would take literal centuries but by changing themselves in order to live in environments not suited for organic life, via technology, genetic tampering, or a combo of those things. It’s not totally plausible, but it’s a twist on space colonization that I’ve seen surprisingly few authors go for post-Varley, and honestly it reads as borderline transhumanist.

Some more context, because the thing with the Eight Worlds stories is that there isn’t a single one which gives us all the details as to how this future humanity works, which might be why none of these stories won awards despite being very fun and interesting. They’re greater than the sum of their parts is what I’m saying. For instance, we’re not told in this story why people aren’t living on Earth anymore; it’s because mankind basically got kicked off Earth by an alien race so much more powerful that it wasn’t even a contest. The bad news is that millions of people died in the ensuing exile, but the good news is that mankind got to inherit the rest of the solar system, including Earth’s moon. Call it a mixed bag. This is a future where cloning is not uncommon, where people can achieve nigh-immortality via memory uploading, where you can get three arms or a fully functioning tail, and where changing one’s sex is seen as perhaps a minor surgical procedure. Timothy himself lived most of his life so far as a woman, only “Changing” a couple years ago, and Dorothy points out that Jubilant looks very much like how Timothy did when he was a she. Right, so I should probably also mention that Varley’s idea of sex and gender, while very permissive for the ’70s, also now seems a bit… backwards. Not “backwards” as in morally dubious (although there is a bit of that), but more that Varley seemed to think of the relationship between sex and gender as reversed from how it actually works. Characters in the Eight Worlds change their gender when they change their sex, as opposed to aligning their sexual characteristics to fit more with their gender, which after all is self-perception. Let’s say there’s a lot to unpack here from a genderqueer perspective.

As for actual quibbles I have with the story, I have a couple, although nothing major. For one I find Varley’s fondness for first-person narration to not always work, depending on the story’s tone and the likability of the narrator. Timothy is a perfectly fine character who works as someone who stands on the shadow-line between childhood and adulthood, but there is a small problem in him being the narrator since we already know in advance that he’ll come out of this problem fine; because “Retrograde Summer” is at least ostensibly an adventure narrative, a tale of survival in which siblings take the situation as their cue to bond. It doesn’t help either that it’s quite hard for people in the Eight Worlds to die permanently, thanks to the aforementioned cloning and memory banks. Thus other means of generating tension are required, and in the case of this story there’s already enough tension between the family members, since Timothy gets the strong impression that Dorothy is keeping secrets from him as to his exact relationship with his sister. It’s hard to blame him, considering Timothy and Jubilant turn out to be a bit more related than the former had previously thought. Before I get to that, I do wanna mention that I like how Varley is able to info-dump on us as to how society on Mercury works whilst making it quite entertaining. Timothy and his mom live on a hilltop, which has a symbolic function but which also serves a practical function given the planet’s tendency for earthquakes. “If you live at the top of a rise, you have a better chance of being near the top of the rubble when it slides down. Besides, my mother and I both liked the view.” It’s like living in California.

Basically this is a story about entering adulthood, which is perhaps predictable, but it’s vividly drawn, helped maybe by the fact that Varley was a burned-out former hippie (or fellow traveler to hippies) who would’ve only been 26 when he wrote this. Timothy is a bit precocious, but he’s convincing as a teen character I think because Varley is writing about a time in one’s life that wouldn’t have been too far away in the rearview mirror for him. There’s an energy and sheer youthfulness to Varley’s early fiction that he wasn’t able to recapture as he got older, but here it’s in a pretty raw state. This is a bit of a double-edged sword, though, since while Varley had a knack for writing child and teen characters, there were also—let’s say problematic things in those early stories that would rub one’s modern sensibilities the wrong way. Starting in the New Wave years more or less there began this troubling tendency in genre SF where relations between grown-ass adults and minors were written about in a way that would (or at least should) give the average person goosebumps, and Varley had to be one of the worst offenders of this back in the ’70s—a discomforting notion that blemished some of what would otherwise be his strongest fiction. “Retrograde Summer” doesn’t have such nonsense, thankfully, although this is still a future society where legally emancipated minors are not too uncommon. Jubilant herself had “divorced her mother when she was ten E-years old,” which as Timothy notes is still a peculiarity, although Jubilant had emancipated herself from her mother on the moon on the basis of “religious insanity.”

If this sounds like a lot, we’re only just getting started.

There Be Spoilers Here

So what counts as religious insanity in the context of the Eight Worlds? As Jubilant tells us, after she and Timothy inevitably get trapped in an earthquake, Dorothy used to be “genotypically” a man… and also their dad. The thing about families in Eight Worlds societies is that they don’t exist anymore, or at least the nuclear family model is considered taboo. It’s one child per parent, and the idea is that each parent would raise their child more or less by themself. You might have a mother, but you wouldn’t have a “father.” That Dorothy used to be a man but also used to be the “father” in a couple that practiced the fringe religious belief of raising children together as a couple (gasp) comes as a shock to Timothy. Oh, and there’s another thing: Timothy is a clone. Jubilant was born first, and in fact Timothy was a clone grown from Jubilant while the latter was still a toddler; so the reason the two look so similar when both are women is that they’re genetically the same person. After finding this out Timothy says it’s a shame the two can’t have sex together while trapped under the rubble, and I can’t tell if this is meant to be a joke on either of their parts. After finding out they’re not siblings (at least not in the traditional sense) there’s some romantic/sexual tension, but it goes unresolved. Does fucking your clone count as incest? Mind you that Varley would write clones boinking each other in some later Eight Worlds stories with the appropriate amount of gusto. Incest enjoyers will get a bit of a kick out of the sexual tension here. Anyway, Timothy and Jubilant are old enough and close enough in age that it wouldn’t really be a problem, at least compared to some of the more questionable relationships in Varley’s fiction (Heinlein has a lot to answer for).

I will say I was surprised to find this classified as a novelette, as I’m sure it barely counts; it’s actually shorter than I was expecting. Our Heroes™ spend the back end of the story doing very little, out of necessity given they’re trying to conserve oxygen; but basically once Timothy starts coming to terms with his status as Jubilant’s clone they’re rescued, just like that. It’s bad storytelling when the conflict is resolved passively, such as here, but it’s the kind of mistake that’s easy to forgive or gloss over given how engrossing Varley’s writing is, even when he’s doing exposition. It’s just that the ending comes too quickly and easily, and there are a couple loose ends, such as how their relationship might develop after this point. Are they into each other or not? It’s unclear. It’s also unclear how this bomb of a revelation will change Timothy’s perception of his mother, but I get we don’t necessarily need to know that. This is a coming-of-age narrative, more about Timothy crossing the shadow-line from childhood to young adulthood than even the real danger of the earthquake. If you read enough of these Eight Worlds stories you realize that main characters are rarely in tangible danger, so instead Varley works to build character and the world around the characters. Unlike (if I’m being brutally honest) a lot of modern short SF, however, which too often strikes me as just moody and no-fun-allowed, Varley’s early writing was fun. I was disappointed by the suddenness of this story’s ending because I wanted more of it, which as I’ve said elsewhere is usually the best complaint one can have about a work of art.

A Step Farther Out

It’s good, even if it ends abruptly. I’ve also read enough of Varley’s short fiction at this point, pretty much all of which came after “Retrograde Summer,” that this didn’t exactly hold any surprises for me. That’s not even a question of the story showing its age, because if this is your first Varley story and you’re reading it in [THE CURRENT YEAR] then you might still find it a little spicy. If anything it’s an indicator of, let’s say more eccentric stories in the Eight Worlds series, that were to come later.

See you next time.