INTERVIEW: John Varley

PLEASE NOTE:

Republibot 3.0:
Our guest today is John Varley, author of the Gaea Trilogy, the Mars/Thunder Trilogy and of course his ongoing Eight Worlds series. In the course of his career, Mister Varley has racked up two Nebulas, three Hugos, and an impressive ten Locus awards. He is clearly one of the brightest lights of his generation of Science Fiction authors, and entirely too impressive and important a man to be wasting his time speaking with the likes of us. And yet here he is!

Thank you, John, for agreeing to this interview.

John Varley:
No problem. The trilogy is actually called Thunder and Lightning, and there will be a fourth book in the series. What’s the word for that? Tetralogy? Quadrology? Whatever. The title will be Dark Lightning.

Republibot 3.0:
Before we get started, I want to say that it’s a sin more of your stories haven’t been turned in to movies. "The Funhouse Effect" just by itself would make a great SF thriller, and the fact that no one has turned "Red Thunder" in to a movie yet just drives me nuts.

Varley:
I’d probably do better with Hollywood if I wrote comic books … sorry, I mean "graphic novels" … but I never enjoyed them, even as a kid, except maybe for Uncle Scrooge. Superheroes bore me. I sometimes think that if I ever watch another comic book movie like Sin City, I’ll puke kryptonite. … I’m sorry, I meant graphic novel.

3.0:
On that note, I really like the way you occasionally use film as a touchstone in your books. In particular, I loved the way you used it in "Golden Globe." In addition to being a really great story, it has that underpinning of being almost a love-letter to classic Hollywood. That got me to thinking about the feedback loop that existed between the real Mafia in the old days and the Big Screen version of them back in the day. You had real life Gangsters emulating Edward G. Robinson, and then the actors started emulating the ever-more iconic Gangsters who were emulating them in the first place.

Do you feel there’s a situation like that in SF today? Where literary SF tries to emulate the movies, and the movies try to emulate literary SF? Does that get problematic for an author?

Varley:
I don’t read much SF, so I really don’t know about that. In the movies, gangstas are still either imitating movie bad guys, or the other way around, I’m not sure. That silly business of holding your pistol sideways, apparently to spoil your aim, the way they dress, and so on. The really silly thing is middle-class teenage white boys imitating ghetto kids with the gigantic, baggy pants so the piece they are carrying is not so obvious. As if they were actually carrying. I’d like to watch when these kids are 50 and take a look at pictures of themselves in these stupid outfits. "What was I thinking?" Pictures of me from the ‘70s look pretty silly, but not as bad as these kids.

3.0:
There’s a mini-renaissance going on with Science fiction on TV these days: Lost, the new Battlestar Galactica, the new Doctor Who, Terminator, the Stargate franchise, do you keep up with any of that? Are there any shows you follow?

Varley:
Not a one. I’ve heard that some of them are good, but I really know nothing about any of those shows. I watch very little regular television, though I spend a lot of time in front of the set. I watch DVDs of movies almost exclusively.

3.0:
What would you *like* to see happen in SF film and television, if you had your druthers?

Varley:
My stuff, of course. Golden age SF by Heinlein, Sturgeon, Silverberg, Ellison. Character-driven stories rather than plot-driven stories. Spider Robinson’s Callahan’s tales