Picnic on Nearside by John Varley

 

(pb; 1980: science fiction anthology. Originally published as The Barbie Murders.)

Overall review

Picnic is a bold, ambitious blast of science fiction free love at the world. Many of its key characters are young people─worldwise children with adult experiences to back their age-accelerated awareness up and technology to pull off fantastic science-fiction feats. That includes non-explicit (mentions of) sex, sometimes incest (which no longer, in Varley’s future centuries, bears out genetically questionable fruits), and if those notions are upsetting for you, Picnic is not the book for you.

Picnic also shares themes and references Varley espoused in his Gaea trilogy (Titan, Wizard, Demon), e.g., a love of cinema and 1950s-era culture, repercussion-free promiscuity, a flouting of conservative culture rules, and advanced maturity and awareness beyond the limits of one’s flesh.

This is an excellent collection, some stories better than others, but all interesting (in a good way), unique and thematically solid (in relation to Picnic’s other stories and in general). Worth owning, this, if you’re not put off by gender-fluid, tastefully stated explorations of love beyond physical boundaries and age.

 

Review, story by story

“Bagatelle”: A depressed cyborg-nuclear bomb (Hans) threatens to blow up the space city of New Dresden. Can a seemingly crazy explosives expert (Roger Birkson) and a police chief (Anna Bach) defuse Hans in time? Excellent, fun, and often unpredictable story.

 

“The Funhouse Effect”: Multiple disasters aboard a tourist comet (Hell’s Snowball) make two of its passengers (Quester and Solace) question the dangerous surreality of their situation. The twist is not unexpected, but the ride is a blast.

 

“The Barbie Murders”: A police detective (Lt. Anne-Louise Bach) is tasked with a near-impossible task: find a killer in Anytown, a religious megacult haven for those who’ve had surgery to look and live like a conformist Barbie doll. Intriguing story, solid ending.

 

“Equinoctial”: A human woman─a Conser─sharing her body and her awareness with an implanted Symb (Symbiotic Space-Environment Organism) named Equinox, floats around the rings of Saturn when her Symb is taken from her by Engineers, religious fanatics who want to paint one of Saturn’s rings red. This theft impels the long-lived woman (Parameter) to retrieve her Symb, who is incubating Parameter’s unborn children. For Parameter, this is the start of an unpredictable and bumpy mission. Clever, satirical, funny, perverse, imaginative, and sporting notions of hippie-era free love (not unlike Varley’s Gaea trilogy), “Equinoctial” is one of my favorite stories in this collection.

 

“Manikins”: Solid story about a student (Evelyn) who interviews a man-hating paranoid schizophrenic (Barbara), a life-changing experience.

 

“Beatnik Bayou”: On Lunar, a planet where age and gender are physically, easily changeable, a thirteen-year-old Lunarian boy (Argus-Darcy-Meric) is about to go through a Change, when he transfers from one life-teacher to another. His current educator, Cathay (a middle-aged man physically regressed to Argus’s age since age seven) is about to age-regress, educate a new student.

Things get complicated when a mentally ill─possibly sociopathic─woman (Tiona) stalks Cathay, Argus and their friends, then files a complaint against them with the Central Computer, Lunar’s legal authority. This not only jeopardizes the scheduled transitions of Argus, Cathay, and their friends, but could get them executed.

 

“Beatnik” is one of my favorite stories in Picnic. This offbeat, playful, thematically mature and warm-hearted tale is delightful and full of unpredictable turns with its imaginative, free-love-meets-ancient-Greece-and-1950s-America mindset (adult teachers can─possibly expected to─have sex with their adolescent students in certain situations, à la the way ancient Greeks did. . . a thirteen-year-old Lunarian is practically the equivalent of an eighteen-year-old in California, United States.) If this last aspect bothers you (there’s no explicit sex in “Beatnik”), you probably shouldn’t read this anthology.

 

“Good-bye, Robinson Crusoe”: On the artificial bubble island of Pacifica beneath the surface of Pluto, a memory-infused, teenage clone of an old man (Piri) resists leaving and growing older─things change quickly with the arrival of Lee, a beautiful dream of a woman, who is more than she appears to be.

This is an excellent, cinematic-intense, and unique reversal-twist of a sort-of-coming-of-age story, memorable for its setting.

 

“Lollipop and the Tar Baby”: A young woman (Xanthia), hovering near Pluto in a lifeboat ship, is contacted by a talking (via radio) black hole. They form a friendship, one that dramatically alters her relationship with the woman (Zoe) who created her through cloning. “Lollipop” is a fun, dark-humored, emerging-identity story.

 

“Picnic on Nearside”: On the moon, two hundred-plus years after the Invasion of Earth, a twelve-year-old boy (Fox, who has the maturity, awareness, and many of the experiences of a seventeen-year-old) and his same-age friend (Halo, no longer a boy but a sexy woman) head to the dangerous, metropolitan ruins of Archimedes. Archimedes, during dark and immediately post-Invasion times, was humanity’s first enclave, but was abandoned because its view of Earth bummed people out─but is there more to it than what people initially saw?