I particularly love the null-suits that replace a lung and allow people to walk around in a vacuum or live on the more inhospitable planets in the solar system. Like the 'Disneylands,' which are environmental terrariums of a sort where people can pretend they're living somewhere on Earth. Like the laws that would be necessary for a civilization that is virtually immortal but also trapped and unable to expand. This is the first of Varley's Eight Worlds books, and the future world he describes has always captured my imagination. What would you do with your body if you could change pretty much anything? What if I could be a man for awhile, and not just through extensive surgery and hormone changes, but the man I would have been if I'd been born as one? I don't care what your sexual orientation is or how strongly you relate to the gender you were born with – is there anyone that wouldn't be interested in finding out how the other half lives? Varley doesn't use sex change and the lack of sexual taboos to titillate his readers. Lilo is not the strongest of Varley's heroines, but she's certainly interesting.Īnd I love the way Varley treats gender and sex, particularly in this novel and in all of the Eight Worlds stories. Lilo's different selves learn and grow in interesting parallels. The development of Lilo as a character is key, and her courage in doing one of the few things that warrant the death penalty is central to the story. You might think it would be difficult to relate to a story that skips from clone to clone of the same person, but I never find it confusing. At least, until the Ophiuchites present humanity with a bill for their services. We follow several versions of Lilo around the solar system and eventually out beyond the orbit of Pluto to the Ophiuchi Hotline, which is a stream of valuable information that has been sent for four hundred years by unknown aliens to the human race, for reasons that no one has bothered to explore. The central theme of this novel is pseudo-immortality through the use of clones and mind recordings, explored through the life experiences of Lilo, a woman condemned to genetic death for the crime of tampering with human DNA.

The remnants of humanity live on the moon as well as pretty much any airless rock and inhospitable planet in the solar system that can hold them. It's six hundred years in the future, and the human race has been permanently exiled from Earth by alien Invaders that prefer cetaceans to humans.

The ophiuchi hotline