Varley Yarn

There was a bomb on the Leystrasse, level forty-five, right outside the Bagatelle Flower and Gift Shoppe, about a hundred meters down the promenade from Prosperity Plaza.

"I am a bomb," the bomb said to passersby. "I will explode in four hours, five minutes, and seventeen seconds. I have a force equal to fifty thousand English tons of trinitrololuene."

A small knot of people gathered to look at it.

So begins Bagatelle by John Varley. Varley is one of my favorite writers. John has won the Locus 14 times, the Hugo three times, and the Nebula once. He has written some of my favorite short stories and some of the most fun novels I have read in recent years. I've been a fan since sometime in the 1970s when I read my first collection of his shorts. He has an unusual voice, one that seems equally adept at writing women as men and he has created some of the most characters. He gets an idea and wrings just about everything you can out of it.

A lot of his stories take place on the moon, in a future where the human race was forcibly removed from the Earth in an almost mass extermination by an alien race who wanted to return the planet to its rightful owners, the dolphins and whales. One such story is Bagatelle, the story of a nuclear bomb found in an underground mall on the moon and the man brought in to talk it out of exploding. You can read it on-line at Scifi.com. Hopefully it will whet your appetite for a little more of the Varley magic which can be found at your neighborhood book store or even here. It's all good stuff folks.