Goodbye, John Varley – I will miss you
My first introduction to John Varley wasn’t through any of his literary works, but through him being the guest-of-honour for the 1989 Australian National Science-Fiction and Fantasy Convention. Swancon 14 just happened to be held in my home town of Perth.
It was also my first SF&F convention, and is, by a long margin, my favourite and most memorable one. Some of that is because of the newness factor, but I have some very personal reasons, as well: I first danced with my (now) wife at the Masquerade. However, what has especially stuck with me most over the last thirty-six years is John Varley’s guest-of-honour speech. I think of it often, and unbeknownst to me at the time, it formed a large part of my education as a writer.
Table of Contents
1989
During Easter 1989, the world was going through a period of transition. The Reagan era had just ended, replaced by George HW Bush. Every Australian still suffered a blinding hangover from celebrating the bicentennial. Emperor Hirohito had died. Exxon Valdez had just grounded1. The run-up to Easter wasn’t especially significant – no major wars, no major events. It just felt like more of the same as 88.
Of course, there were a bunch of events that would happen later in the year that still shape the sociopolitical landscape: Tiananmen Square massacre; fall of the Berlin Wall; invasion of Panama. But that was yet to emerge.
However, for John Varley, it must have been a personally momentous time. The movie version of his novel, Millennium, was just about to be released. He’d been working on it (in various forms) since 1977. And yet, he agreed to travel half-way around the world to speak with a bunch of people, who – like me – had never heard of him before. Most of them still hadn’t read any of his work, by the time he arrived. To be honest, I can’t remember if I had read Millennium before the con. My heart says yes, but I can’t truly remember. I did read it though, and enjoyed it. The movie, not so much.
Millennium
In any case, much of John Varley’s GOH speech was spent providing information about the forthcoming movie. He had lots of photos – mostly of the wreckage of the plane crash – and some wonderful anecdotes. Like how the plane wreckage looked so real that pilots flying overhead reported it as a downed airliner.
However, as he neared the end of his speech, he pivoted to a topic that was evidently very close to his heart (and now mine too). On the 14th February 1989, another event occurred that still shapes our world. It was on that date that the leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa calling for the murder of Salman Rushdie. The charge was the alleged blasphemy against Islam by Rushdie in his novel Satanic Versus.
John Varley did not hold back in his excoriation against the fatwa, and the person that issued it. He also did not hold back on the criticism of censorship in general. To a writer (and others of like mind), the words are sometimes the only power we have left. To deny us them, with concocted and fabricated reasons – at that, is to deny us life itself.
And yet, in 2025, our position has not improved – in fact it has gotten worse. Not only is the fatwa still in place (Rushdie lost an eye due to an attack by an Islamic terrorist in 2022), but even in the so-called bastion of free speech, the SCOTUS has found the banning of ‘certain’ books to be lawful. And in my own country, children under the age of 16 are banned from accessing most social media. A clear violation of their freedoms of speech and association.
John Varley is Salman Rushdie
At the very end of his speech, John Varley issued a challenge to those of us in attendance, to oppose censorship in all its wicked forms. He finished with these final words, that still resounds with me to this day: I AM SALMAN RUSHDIE. A clear cry that he stood alongside his fellow writer to oppose the tyranny of the wilfully ignorant.
The world is much worse for John Varley’s passing.
I am Salam Rushdie.
- the Exxon Valdex grounding had happened only a day or so before, and so it wasn’t known how bad it would become. ↩︎