I first read Steel Beach (1992, USA) when it was published, and then again in 2001, yet when I came to reread it this year I remembered very little of the book — and that despite generally being a fan of Varley’s fiction, and especially his stories set in his Eight Worlds.
On the other hand, there’s that opening line. That’s certainly hard to forget:
“In five years, the penis will be obsolete,” said the salesman.
Back in the early 1990s, Iain Banks and myself had a somewhat drunken conversation in which we came up with variations on the first line of Steel Beach and Banks’s own The Crow Road (1992, UK), which was:
It was the day my grandmother exploded.
I forget the sentence we eventually decided on, but I suspect it’s dim memories of that conversation which have made it hard for me to recall much else about Varley’s novel.
However, when I started this reading of Steel Beach, I discovered the book was actually a great deal of fun. Hildy Johnson is a wise-cracking and irreverent narrator, with a good line in repartee. And then I remembered Steel Beach had generated complaints shortly after publication because parts of it contradicted existing fiction set in the Eight Worlds — and Varley even makes a point of saying so in an afterword. It’s not so much retcon as it is an artistic choice to ignore what may or may not have happened in earlier stories in the same world. And, to be fair, Varley was under no obligation to ensure Steel Beach was consistent with previous works, no author is; and why should it even matter, if the end result is a novel that is good, enjoyable, or both?
Hildy Johnson is a reporter in King City on the Moon. Which is one of the Eight Worlds, colonies scattered through the Solar System, where humanity survives after everyone on Earth was killed by the Invaders. Hildy has attempted suicide several times, for no reason he can understand, and is asked by the Central Computer, which administers every settlement on the Moon, to investigate the general uptick in suicides.
Varley fubs this — Hildy’s investigation goes nowhere, and Varley doesn’t really have a convincing explanation; all he really wants to do is put Hildy in a position where he — and later, she — is open to join the Heinleiners. Who are so-called because they inhabit an extensive junkpile on the lunar surface which includes the Robert A Heinlein, a failed attempted at an interstellar generation ship. The Heinleiners, to some extent, share Heinlein’s politics, or at least some aspects, as Heinlein’s politics changed a lot and were often hard to unravel.
Basically, the Heinleiners are sort of libertarian anarchists — and survive chiefly thanks to the null-field and null-suit, both inventions of their leader, “Merlin”. Steel Beach ends with an attack by the CC’s forces on the Heinleiners, which hints at the introduction of technologies mentioned in earlier Eight Worlds stories.
Before that happens, there’s the assassination of the latest inductee into the First Latitudinarian Church of Celebrity Saints panoply of gigastars, a disaster at a surface resort when a dome cracks, the possible murder by the CC of a 300-year-old man, Hildy changing gender and settling down as the schoolmarm in a re-enactment town in the Texas Disneyland, and soon pregnant, and the coronation of the latest Queen of England. Hildy models himself/herself on the film character (and his protegé takes the name Brenda Starr), and the dialogue is frequently as snappy as the movie’s. Mostly, the novel is fun — except for a couple of worrying references to Hitler, and a handful of instances of borderline paedophilia.
Do I really care Steel Beach mentions the Barbie cult, the subject of short story ‘The Barbie Murders’ (1978, USA), which actually takes place in the Anna-Louise Bach universe, which may well be set on the Moon, but is not the Eight Worlds universe? Not really, no. (If I remember right, in Irontown Blues (2018, USA), Varley attempted to merge the Anna-Louise Bach and Eight Worlds universes.) Do I care the null-field and null-suits were invented by a human on the Moon in Steel Beach? Not particularly. Or that the technology to record minds, and later play them into new-grown bodies, is not commonplace in Steel Beach but a major plot point late in the novel? I can’t say I am.
Having said that, for Varley to write the Ophiuchi Hotline out of the Eight Worlds universe is to completely “forget” his debut novel, er, The Ophiuchi Hotline (1977, USA). And that doesn’t ring true. In Steel Beach, Varley wrote the novel he wanted, or set out, to write; and if it meant conveniently not remembering major elements of world-building from previous stories — and novel — he chose to claim laziness. (His afterword actually uses the word “ennui”.)
And yes, “laziness” does in some respects seem to cast a shadow over Steel Beach. Not only did Varley ignore elements of the Eight Worlds documented in earlier works, he recycled earlier stories for the plot of Steel Beach. Hildy spends a lot of time in the Texas Disneyland, echoing the plot of ‘The Phantom of Kansas’ (1976, USA). Hildy’s therapeutic year on a VR desert island recapitulates the story ‘Overdrawn at the Memory Bank’ (1976, USA). There are other details which are lifted directly from earlier stories.
But, like I said, none of this really matters. Steel Beach takes place in a universe which shares many elements with the Eight Worlds, but belongs to that universe purely by authorial fiat. Of course, everything in a work of fiction is by authorial fiat. Taken on its own merits, Steel Beach is amusing, entertaining… but ultimately disappointing. John Varley is a science fiction writer still worth reading, and I dearly love some of his works… and Steel Beach reads — mostly — as well today as it did in 1992…
But. If you haven’t read any of the Eight Worlds stories, it could spoil your reading of them; if you have read any of the Eight Worlds stories, then it could spoil your reading of Steel Beach. And yet, Hildy is a great narrator, and it’s an enjoyable sf novel even now, thirty years after it was published…
It’s just not as good as Varley’s other works set in the Eight Worlds.
