Not too long ago I reviewed Mr. Varley’s novel Rolling Thunder. Now, I have an interview with the author himself. Enjoy! Firstly, thanks for doing this interview with me. Could you tell us a little about yourself (sort of a short biography if you will)? Born and raised in Texas, got out as soon as I could, right after high school. National Merit Scholarship to Michigan State, dropped out, went on the road, became a hippie, did a lot of drugs, stopped doing a lot of drugs. Went to Woodstock accidentally. Lived in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, started writing. Been doing the same ever since. What projects are you currently working on, if any? Could you tell us about them? I’m working on a novel suggested by my editor that involves a post-apocalyptic world. I can’t reveal too many details about it, as the cause of the apocalypse is rather unusual. Did your editor suggest the idea for your post-apocalyptic novel or just the idea of a post-apocalyptic world in general? Is this something different for you in relation to your other work (without revealing details, obviously, I just happen to be a fan of this subgenre)? She just wanted a book about how things can go bad, and how we’d survive during and afterward. I cooked up the disaster myself. Why do you write? (more or less, I’m curious why you decided to write SF and fiction in general) I write to make a living, and to amuse myself. I write SF because it’s all I know how to do. I read mainly thrillers and mysteries, and I’d write those if I knew how, but I don’t. Your biography on your website says you used to run behind DDT-trucks. Is that exactly as it sounds (a young John Varley running happily behind a truck spraying DDT everywhere)? If you’d grown up on the Texas Gulf Coast you’d know exactly what I mean. The mosquitoes there were suspected of carrying off small cats and dogs to devour at their leisure. Nobody knew then that DDT was bad for you (actually, it isn’t, is it? It’s bad for birds and fish), so every night trucks would cover every street in town, spraying a soothing cloud of DDT mist that–back then, anyway, they probably eat DDT for lunch, now–killed the skeeters. Big enough to carry off small cats and dogs? Was this like a strange conspiracy, like the Area 51 UFO mythos (true or not)? Government experiments to create super mosquitoes to decrease the animal population might work better than Bob Barker, I suppose. That’s just how we grow ’em in that part of Texas. They sometimes pick up armadillos and drop them from a height to stun their prey. But the stories that they are responsible for cattle mutilations and 9/11 are not true. What about your past has influenced your writing? Reading. Even in SF you use your real-world experience, of course, if you intend to have believable characters and events, but the core of SF is concepts that you get by reading in science, and other SF stories. What are some resources you use for finding scientific ideas, concepts, news, etc.? The news. The Internet. My own speculations. I have to say that the KYAGs (or these sort of stasis bubbles, for those that don’t know what I’m talking about) is a really brilliant idea. Out of curiosity, were they inspired by anything you read about or did it just come out of the blue? Out of the blue, like all my ideas. How much research into the science side of things did you do? You have quite a lot of ideas that I have to admit have not shown up in a lot of SF I have read (such as the fact that your human characters from Mars are actually noticeably taller than folks from Earth, which is realistic because of the difference in gravity). Only as much research as I have to do. These days it’s made a lot easier by the Internet. I was able to find the names and orbits of all of Jupiter’s moons in one place, Wikipedia, and I wonder if that information is even available on paper except at a major university or observatory. The tall Martians, alas, are not an original idea. I can’t recall where I first saw it, but someone else had that idea first. Who knows if it would really work that way? We’re many years away from finding out. One of the interesting things about your writing style is how you portray Podkayne throughout the novel. We’re given a direct look into her mind, almost like stream of consciousness, but without the lack of punctuation. Did you find it at all difficult to write in this manner, or did the character’s voice just jump onto the page in this way? How did the character of Podkayne come about? Was it easy to get into her head? Characterization is the easiest thing about writing, for me. I slip effortlessly into someone else’s head, and that person grows as I go along. Plot is what I find difficult. Podkayne just started out with a name and a location, and I followed her wherever she went. I didn’t know she was a singer until she started to sing. With it being so easy to get into a character’s head, is it ever difficult to separate yourself from those characters when switching gears to a new story? Do you find yourself still writing in the voice of another character even though you’ve finished that story? No, when that story is done the character shuts up. Of course, in the THUNDER AND LIGHTNING series some of the same characters show up again, but considerably older, and in the background. You talk a lot about music within this novel and I’m curious if you already knew a lot of the things you wrote about, or if you researched them for your character. What
