“The Phantom of Kansas” by John Varley is story #21 of 52 from The World Treasury of Science Fiction edited by David G. Hartwell (1989), an anthology my short story club is group reading. Stories are discussed on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. “The Phantom of Kansas” first appeared in Galaxy Science Fiction (February 1976). It is currently available in The John Varley Reader: Thirty Years of Short Fiction. That collection is available on paper, as an ebook, and as an audiobook (18 stories — 26 hours and 36 minutes).

A science fiction writer is like an artist with a blank canvas, they can paint anything they can see or imagine. When you look at composing science fiction that way, you have to wonder why some authors put more on their canvas and others less, and where the images come from. With, “The Phantom of Kansas” John Varley decided to lay out his canvas with a series of related science-fictional scenes.

The setting is the Moon — after aliens have taken over the Earth and pushed humans out across the solar system — part of Varley’s Eight Worlds series. Now this image is enough to fill a whole canvas but is merely a small object in the background in this painting. Varley wisely chose not to do an elaborate alien invasion mural, those were old and tired even back in 1976. We are told it’s November 342, so I assume humanity restarted the clock when our home world was snatched away from us. This aspect of the painting does intrigue me, and I wish I could see that section of the canvas expanded.

The plot is a murder mystery. The protagonist, a woman named Fox, has just been revived in a clone body and learns she’s been murdered three times before. So she’s actually Fox 4. Because some murderers in this future like to permanently kill people, they must kill the person and destroy the memory cube that backs up their personality. This murderer has failed three times, why? Fox is told she should expect to be murdered again unless the police can find the murderer first. She doesn’t want to become Fox 5. This is a solid subject for a painting and I would have been satisfied if it was the subject of the whole canvas. However, I wouldn’t have been that impressed, not like I am with the additional imagery Varley squeezes in.

For Varley, this unique murder mystery wasn’t enough to dominate his canvas. We see Fox is an artist who engineers weather dramas. This requires quite a bit of world-building on Varley’s part. Humans who live on the Moon mainly live underground, but they crave being out in nature like humans did on Earth. So giant artificial environments are created that replicate various natural settings from old Earth. Varley calls disneylands. Fox is working on a giant storm symphony that spawns several tornadoes for a disneyland that’s a replica of the Kansas prairie.

The Kansas disneyland is a hollowed-out cylinder twenty kilometers beneath Clavius. It’s two-hundred and fifty kilometers in diameter, and five kilometers high. That’s a huge feat of super-science engineering.

Now this is interesting. Those pesky aliens got rid of humans and all our artifacts on Earth so they could enjoy nature. The human refugees in space long for the wonders of Mother Nature. What should we feel about that revealed in the painting? Back in 1976 when I was young I was dying to go into space, but now in 2023 and I’m old, you couldn’t pay me to go there. Mother nature is the place to be.

But Varley isn’t finished with adding subjects with his brush. He paints another character onto his canvas that vividly stands out, the Central Computer. Varley portrays the computer as it, which I like. Gender is a biological trait. And like Mike in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, this computer is a quite charming and appealing image.

And there is one other aspect that reminds me of Heinlein. People can change gender. Fox has been a he in the past. And, at first, I thought this was just another added detail in Varley’s scene, but it turns out to be an essential plot element.

I’ve seen “The Phantom of Kansas” before, decades ago, and it impressed me then, except that it depends on one of my least favorite scenarios in science fiction, brain downloading and uploading. And I like that theme even less this time. However, it’s needed for the plot, so I begrudgingly accepted it.

In my judgment of art, science fiction scenes are somewhat realistic paintings, inspired by what we see in reality, whereas fantasy scenes are modern art, paintings inspired by inner visions. I liked this painting better this time because I viewed the painting as a fantasy. It’s a clever image of a murder mystery derived from an interesting series of what-if mental conjectures.

Ultimately, the painting, “The Phantom of Kansas” is elegantly symmetrical. Like any good mystery, all the clues were there, even if they were highly contrived.

James Wallace Harris, 6/22/23