Find every Tuesday a Time.news, an interview or a portrait linked to a science fiction text that is making the news. This week, how John Varley’s Cloé decided to become a man.
It’s a pearl fished out of the past, of those futures of yesterday that tell of our present, of those visionary angles that have not been stricken with obsolescence. The latest volume of Dyschroniques, the collection created in 2013 by Dominique Bellec which unearths SF short stories, is entitled Options et comes just about the time. The “options” in John Varley’s story are the possibility of changing sex. His female character, Cleo (Cleopatra) King, three children, chief architect, goes to the office with the youngest, whom she is still breastfeeding, with no other solution than to keep her with you in a society where everyone works.
In transport, Cléo who surfs the news of the day is magnetized by an article, “Change: the revolution in the role of the sexes (or: Who has the upper hand?)”. In twenty years, she learns, the number of “changes” has greatly increased. “There is now more than a one in two chance that among your acquaintances there is someone who has undergone at least one sex change. There is more than a one in fifteen chance that you yourself have changed; if you are under 20, this proposal increases to a one in three chance. Tired of having to manage the children rather than her husband Jules, and of their sexual relations which she finds a little too one-sided, she is tempted to try to go to the other side. At the New Heredity Beauty Salon, she is placed in front of a mirror, in reality a holographic screen which, in a few seconds, transforms her into a male stranger. The process involves cloning and then brain transplantation. She has a few months to think about it, while the clone is being developed. Then, it will be “changer”.
Optionswhich is part of John Varley’s series the Eight Worldswas first published in May 1979 in the collection Universe 9 by Thierry Carr and was a finalist for the Hugo and Locus awards in 1980. It was translated into French in May 1986 in the anthology Universe 1986 by Pierre K. Rey, but never reissued since. If the division of roles in private life may appear a little simplistic today, the short story explores the freedom to have one’s own body in a society where progress in biology is such that it is possible to change sex very easily, and even to go back. “What I want is free choice, explains Cleo to Jules. I’m not unhappy to be a woman. But I don’t like the feeling that there is anything that I can’t be.” It is therefore not the social environment that poses a problem, but more the way in which this affects the future of the romantic relationship, relationships with others, and also the question of the indistinction between “changers” and others. John Varley, who recounts in a postscript from 2004 how he experienced the context of sexual and feminist liberation, imagines Cléo becoming Leo who disturbs Jules, and questions him about identity.