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The Ophiuchi Hotline is a 1977 science fiction novel by American writer John Varley. It was nominated for a Locus Award. [1] Part of his Eight Worlds series, the novel opens in the year 2618.
Prior to the beginning of the story, humanity has been expelled from Earth by powerful aliens known as "the Invaders", and scattered across eight planets and satellites of the Solar System, the so-called Eight Worlds. The Invaders originate from a gas giant planet, and have occupied Jupiter, forbidding human access to it. Human expansion to the Eight Worlds has been aided by a broadcast of information from outside the Solar System, named "The Ophiuchi hotline" after the constellation from which it appears to originate. The information received from this includes extensive material on biological modification, and while sex changes and other modifications have become routine surgeries, experimentation with human DNA remains taboo and forbidden on penalty of death. Related to this, while technology has been developed to allow people to back-up their memories, this is only permitted for implantation within a cloned body in case of death. Due to resource scarcity, only one clone of a person is allowed to exist at any one time, and, similarly, reproduction is restricted to one child per person. An exception exists for those people who join the artificially-created symbionts that can live openly in the vacuum of space.
The protagonist, Lilo, has experimented with human DNA and, when discovered, is sentenced to death. However, the night before her execution, a powerful lunar politician named Tweed offers her the chance to escape her sentence by replacing her with a clone killed in her place. Lilo accepts and Tweed takes her into hiding.
Tweed is the leader of a movement that intends to expel the Invaders and recover Earth, and makes Lilo join this movement under the watch of Vaffa, a guard who has multiple illegal clones, both male and female. Lilo attempts to escape twice, but each time she is killed by Vaffa, and a clone is revived with her original memories.
The third clone of Lilo is sent to an outlying moon of Jupiter, Poseidon, within which Tweed pursues clandestine research performed by illegal clones. Lilo bonds with Cathay, the teacher of the colony's children, and they become lovers. She is given a null-field suit — a conforming forcefield with an air generator that protects her from the vacuum — and is tasked with researching how to kill creatures that live in Jupiter's atmosphere. She reveals to Cathay that, when she began her original experiments, she put a clone of herself and a backup of her memories in a secret base in Saturn's rings, to ensure her survival in the event that she was executed.
Tweed then acquires a micro black hole with the intention of passing it through Jupiter in an attack on the Invaders. Lilo and Cathay board the ship transporting the black hole and seize it. After a struggle, Lilo and a Vaffa clone fall towards Jupiter. Vaffa dies, but Lilo encounters an Invader and is taken to a future version of Earth almost devoid of humanity.
Tweed then awakens another version of Lilo and sends her with a clone of Vaffa to Pluto to research a new message coming from the Ophiuchi Hotline. This one has been translated as a payment demand for the information that humanity has received, but does not specify what form the payment is to take. Lilo and Vaffa find a second clone of Cathay, and the three of them are tasked to lease a ship from navigators dedicated to hunt for black holes, and go beyond the orbit of Pluto to analyze the message. They eventually hire Javelin, one of the most successful black hole hunters.
Once in space, Javelin reveals that the black hole hunters have discovered that the beam of the Hotline originates from a point only half a light-year away from the solar system, scrambled to seem to come from much farther, and she will take them to the source of the beam. However, since the trip will take 20 years Lilo, Vaffa and Cathay go in hibernation.
In the meantime, the first clone of Cathay uses the stolen ship to reach Lilo's base. There he meets Parameter/Solstice, a human-symbiont pair who also know the location of the base. They revive the clone and use the ship to attack Poseidon, taking it out of orbit and destroying its security systems. To do this they crash Lilo's base into a black hole held in a force field on the moon's surface. They carry out a plan to transform the asteroid into a ship to travel to Alpha Centauri, but reveal Tweed's dangerous activities to the Eight Worlds, forcing Tweed to go into hiding.
When Javelin's ship and its passengers reaches the source of the Hotline, they are greeted by seemingly-human extraterrestrials who have been expecting them. They explain that most races in the universe have experienced a similar history with the Invaders: they are expelled from their home planets by the Invaders; they attempt to recover their planets by force, much as Tweed has been doing; and in the ensuing conflict they are driven out of their solar systems entirely. The extraterrestrials have been broadcasting information via the Ophiuchi Hotline to give humanity the tools they need for survival, and the price they ask in exchange is to be allowed to live alongside and within the minds of humans, so that they can add humanity's experience and thoughts to their own pool of knowledge. They suggest that, if humanity does not comply, they will turn the symbionts into an army that will attack humanity on the Eight Worlds.
The clone of Lilo previously transported to Earth spends 25 years there. Because of her null-field suit which she can turn on at will, she is worshipped as a god by the surviving humans scratching out a living at a pre-industrial technological level. During a dive to hunt a whale, she encounters an Invader, somehow steals a silver cube from it and is instantaneously transported to the source of the Hotline. There she meets her clone, and they find that the memories and knowledge of all of their clones, including those killed by Tweed, are somehow mixed and shared between them.
Somewhat surprised by this turn of events, the extraterrestrials explain that the silver cube is a singularity that can be used for space propulsion by canceling inertia. They add that the Invaders only give such a "gift" to races when they're preparing to expel them entirely from their home planetary system. Confronted with this news, Javelin, Cathay, Vaffa and both clones of Lilo return to the solar systems to alert humanity.
As the novel concludes, the clone of Lilo traveling in the asteroid towards Alpha Centauri meditates on her shared memories, and realizes that when she arrives there her fellow clones, and most of humanity, will be already be there waiting for her, having used the singularity for faster travel.
In the novel, characters can be cloned and change sex. Memories can be recorded and played back into a new clone, allowing a kind of immortality. It is illegal for more than one copy of a person to exist. Certain crimes, including illegal cloning, result in "permanent death" where all clones and personality recordings must be destroyed. Criminals are tossed into the gravity well of a black hole that supplies the Lunar society with energy.
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