Cover artist: Boris Vallejo
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.
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.
In astronomy, an extraterrestrial sky is a view of outer space from the surface of an astronomical body other than Earth.
The Eight Worlds are the fictional setting of a series of science fiction novels and short stories by John Varley, in which the Solar System has been colonized by human refugees fleeing an alien invasion of the Earth. Earth and Jupiter are off-limits to humanity, but Earth's Moon and the other worlds and moons of the Solar System have all become heavily populated. There are also minor colonies set in the Oort cloud at the edge of the Solar System. Faster than light travel is not possible, though it is mentioned that test-flights will begin soon at the end of The Golden Globe, and the species has not as yet managed to extend itself to other stars.
The Golden Globe is a 1998 science fiction novel by American writer John Varley. The book takes places a few years after the conclusion of Steel Beach. It was nominated for Best Science Fiction Novel during the 1999 Locus Awards.
Saturn has made appearances in fiction since the 1752 novel Micromégas by Voltaire. In the earliest depictions, it was portrayed as having a solid surface rather than its actual gaseous composition. In many of these works, the planet is inhabited by aliens that are usually portrayed as being more advanced than humans. In modern science fiction, the Saturnian atmosphere sometimes hosts floating settlements. The planet is occasionally visited by humans and its rings are sometimes mined for resources.
The Grand Tour is a series of novels written by American science fiction author Ben Bova.
The fictional portrayal of the Solar System has often included planets, moons, and other celestial objects which do not actually exist in reality. Some of these objects were, at one time, seriously considered as hypothetical planets which were either thought to have been observed, or were hypothesized to be orbiting the Sun in order to explain certain celestial phenomena. Often such objects continued to be used in literature long after the hypotheses upon which they were based had been abandoned.
Larklight, or the Revenge of the White Spiders! or to Saturn's Rings and Back! is a young adult novel written by Philip Reeve and illustrated by David Wyatt. It is the first book in the Larklight Trilogy.
A planet symbol or planetary symbol is a graphical symbol used in astrology and astronomy to represent a classical planet or one of the modern planets. The symbols were also used in alchemy to represent the metals associated with the planets, and in calendars for their associated days. The use of these symbols derives from classical Greco-Roman astronomy, although their current altered shapes were developed in the 16th century.
Steel Beach is a 1992 science fiction novel by American writer John Varley.
Planet Heroes was a line of toys from Fisher-Price depicting various heroic characters each identified with a specific planet.
Discovery and exploration of the Solar System is observation, visitation, and increase in knowledge and understanding of Earth's "cosmic neighborhood". This includes the Sun, Earth and the Moon, the major planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, their satellites, as well as smaller bodies including comets, asteroids, and dust.
The Quiet War is a 2008 science fiction novel written by Paul McAuley. It was initially published by Gollancz on 16 October 2008. The novel was an Arthur C. Clarke Award Nominee in 2009.
In astrology, planets have a meaning different from the astronomical understanding of what a planet is. Before the age of telescopes, the night sky was thought to consist of two similar components: fixed stars, which remained motionless in relation to each other, and moving objects/"wandering stars", which moved relative to the fixed stars over the course of the year(s).
Alien Legacy is a sci-fi strategy game developed by Ybarra Productions and published by Sierra On-Line in 1994 for MS-DOS.
"Brake" is a science fiction short story by American writer Poul Anderson, first published in 1957 in Astounding Science Fiction and reprinted in the collections Beyond the Beyond (1969) and The Psychotechnic League (1981). As a component of the Psychotechnic League future history / alternate history, "Brake" takes place in 2270, as the civilization built up in the aftermath of the 1958 Third World War is being torn between mutually antagonistic factions, on the verge of collapsing into "the day of genocide and the night of ignorance and tyranny".
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to the Solar System:
Death's End is a science fiction novel by the Chinese writer Liu Cixin. It is the third novel in the trilogy titled Remembrance of Earth's Past, following the Hugo Award-winning novel The Three-Body Problem and its sequel, The Dark Forest. The original Chinese version was published in 2010. Ken Liu translated the English edition in 2016. It was a finalist for the 2017 Hugo Award for Best Novel and winner of the 2017 Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel.
Wanderers is a 2014 Swedish science fiction short film created by the digital artist and animator Erik Wernquist. The film depicts actual locations in the Solar System being investigated by human explorers, aided by hypothetical space technology. Of the film's fifteen scenes, Wernquist created some using solely computer graphics, but most are based on actual photographs taken by robotic spacecraft or rovers combined with additional computer-generated elements.
