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A review by oleksandr
The Ophiuchi Hotline by John Varley
4.0
This is a short novel by John Varley, who in the late 1970s was considered by some ‘the next Heinlein’. While I don’t think that he is, but this doesn’t mean he isn’t a good and strong SF author, for he definitely is.
The novel is set in the Eight Worlds universe. The following text will spoiler a bit but no more than the book’s page here on Goodreads. The Mankind lost the Earth to singularity-level (?) invaders. There was no real war, for there was nothing the humanity could have done. Now it lives across the Solar system (the remnants of extra-terran colonies), thus the title. The humanity was helped a great deal by info streaming from the direction of Ophiuchi 70, the star 17 light years from the Solar system. The reason why this info was supplied has never occurred to the mankind, which grabbed this free lunch while it can.
Some five centuries passed after the invasion. A renegade gene-engineer is sentenced to death, but it saved by Luna’s politician, who commits the high crime of cloning her mind and body without destroying the original. The engineer, called Lilo-Alexandr-Calypso is then used to promote Free Earth (a group that plans to re-capture the Earth), without much enthusiasm. She is more interested in running away. There will be clones, asteroids, aliens, black holes and adventures in abundance.
There are a lot of allusions (intentional or not) to many classic SF, like invasive holo-ads (see [b:Podkayne of Mars|50839|Podkayne of Mars|Robert A. Heinlein|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1388228048s/50839.jpg|2534895]), or 4D representation of human (see [b:Slaughterhouse-Five|4981|Slaughterhouse-Five|Kurt Vonnegut|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1440319389s/4981.jpg|1683562]).
A very interesting author, recommended.
The novel is set in the Eight Worlds universe. The following text will spoiler a bit but no more than the book’s page here on Goodreads. The Mankind lost the Earth to singularity-level (?) invaders. There was no real war, for there was nothing the humanity could have done. Now it lives across the Solar system (the remnants of extra-terran colonies), thus the title. The humanity was helped a great deal by info streaming from the direction of Ophiuchi 70, the star 17 light years from the Solar system. The reason why this info was supplied has never occurred to the mankind, which grabbed this free lunch while it can.
Some five centuries passed after the invasion. A renegade gene-engineer is sentenced to death, but it saved by Luna’s politician, who commits the high crime of cloning her mind and body without destroying the original. The engineer, called Lilo-Alexandr-Calypso is then used to promote Free Earth (a group that plans to re-capture the Earth), without much enthusiasm. She is more interested in running away. There will be clones, asteroids, aliens, black holes and adventures in abundance.
There are a lot of allusions (intentional or not) to many classic SF, like invasive holo-ads (see [b:Podkayne of Mars|50839|Podkayne of Mars|Robert A. Heinlein|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1388228048s/50839.jpg|2534895]), or 4D representation of human (see [b:Slaughterhouse-Five|4981|Slaughterhouse-Five|Kurt Vonnegut|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1440319389s/4981.jpg|1683562]).
A very interesting author, recommended.