Some more thoughts about John Varley…and length

Reading in Asimov’s collection of the Hugo winners from 1980-1982 (Volume 5, in case you’re keeping score), and so decided to skip around a year – all the way from 1981 to 1982. John Varley won again that year for a short story, “The Pusher,” which is a nice little trifle about that old chestnut in sf of time dilation – you know, where you’re traveling at speeds close to light which means that time passes for you much more slowly than it does on earth, so if you return to the planet after space travel, what seems to have been six months for you is fifty years for the planet. (As a kid, I read Heinlein’s juvenile – as they called them in the trade, the book wasn’t juvenile at all, even if it was for juveniles – Time for the Stars, which had the same premise, with a neat twist involving identical twins that maybe I’ll write about at some other point.) At any rate, Varley’s take – of a man who looks (and, in some metaphorical sense, is?) like a child molester telling young kids stories which prime them to be lovers/friends of his when he returns several months later, but when they’re adults, thanks to the time dilation – is characteristically clever, even if the story takes its time to get there. I found myself thinking, as I’ve written before, that Varley does his best work at the shorter lengths….and then went back to discover that in fact almost all his nominations and wins before in non-novel lengths had not in fact been in the short story medium (with one exception, the far superior “Air Raid,” nominated but which didn’t win), but in the novelette and novella areas. A full discussion of the development and basis for these *different* non-novel lengths is for another time: for now suffice it to say that it’s possible that Varley has some issues with brevity as well as with length, and that he found a genre where the lengths of the novella and novelette – which, as Stephen King has remarked, are pretty hard lengths to publish more generally – are not only suitable to his gifts, but rewardable as well.

Tags: 1982, heinlein, hugo awards, science fiction, varley