Customer Reviews

The Ophiuchi Hotline

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The Ophiuchi Hotline is the first John Varley novel I've ever read. Before I've read three Varley short stories: The Exellent 'Press Enter' which was one of the finest novellas I've ever read, and a Hugo award winner, 'Air Raid' which was the basis for the movie 'Millenium', which was pretty good, and 'Goodbye, Robinson Crusoe' which was an unsuccesful 8 Worlds short story.

The consensus amoung SF fans seems to be that Varley is a great short story writer, but not a terrific novelist. When thy talk about his novels, the only one that is REALLY appreciated seems to be 'The Ophiuchi Hotline'. After reading it, I can testify that it is indeed a novel worth talking about.

The Ophiuchi Hotline of the title is a stream of information coming from Ophiuchius constelation. It is the basis of all human knowledge for 5 hundred years - after all, when you got all the answers supplied, why bother studying?

The Story's heroine, Lilo, does wish to study. Furthermore, she wishes to study human genetics - which is illegal. The book follows her story, mostly, as she struggles in a world filled with deception, intrigue, and some of the coolest Science Fictional explorations of many a theme, most notably cloning.

the stuff John Varley does with the idea of cloning in this story, especially at one point about 50 pages into it is brilliant and original. Varley's thoughts about cloning are striking and very clever.

The plotting and characterisation of the novel is generally very well done. Varley can truely differentiate his characters, and manages to make a very complicated plot decievingly simple to follow.

If there's a weakness to the novel it is the ending. All the plots line are resolved, which is quite a difficult and an impressive task, but the novel's end of kind of disappoint anyway. You're expecting a bang, and it goes down with a whispher. A LOUD whispher, mind you, but nonetheless.

Still, Varley is in top form here, and I would recommand this novel easily. It is out of print, but not too hard to find. Go get it.

The only other book I've read by Varley is the relatively recent Steel Beach, which I enjoyed quite a bit, especially the opening line, which I still remember fondly to this day (if you've read the book you'll know what I'm talking about, if not, crack the book open in a bookstore and you'll see what I mean). The blueprint for a lot of the stuff in that novel can be found here, at least when it comes to Varley's worldview and his interpretation of SF. He does a clever thing in this novel and puts forward a situation that has already happened long in the book's past, so that while it informs the character's present actions, the reader wasn't really there for it, it's part of history. Here, the premise is that humanity has been kicked off Earth by the super-powerful Invaders, who apparently get along real well with dolphins and whatever lives inside Jupiter. Humanity, with nowhere left to go, spreads throughout the solar system and tries to make do with the fact that the homeworld is off limits. Over the years they've been getting all their information from something called the Hotline, a laser beam of information from an unknown source that they can only translate partially, but what they can figure out has made life interesting for everyone. In this novel, the presentation is just as important as the plot and Varley pulls out all the stops to depict his wild future history, of a human culture adapted to the stars, where sex changes and physical changes are completely ordinary . . . for all the wacky stuff, he manages to make it feel real, not an easy thing to do. The plot has to do with a man named Tweed trying to figure out how to get rid of the Invaders . . . to that end he gathers various people who have been kicked out of society and tries to use them . . . sometimes cloning them when things go slightly awry. The issues of cloning and genetics are consistently impressive and well thought out, almost surreal in a sense, especially when it focuses on the slightly rebellious main character Lilo, who keeps getting cloned more often than she'd like. Meanwhile just to make things more complicated, the Hotline seems to have sent along a phone bill, and no one is quite sure what that's supposed to mean. This is a lot of story for such a slim book and Varley manages to pull it off with a lot of skill, although the ending is still rather abrupt and the plot seems to lose focus toward the end. It can also be said that the idea of humanity playing third fiddle to just about everyone is sort of depressing and certainly not the most uplifting concept, but hey, life is like that sometimes. Not everything comes up roses all the time. His people soldier on anyway, determined to live their lives, even if in the cosmic scheme of things it's utterly pointless. Not a crowd pleasing premise, but the images and ideas he puts forward are amazing, his future is just as fully realized and complex as the real world and you won't regret any of the time you invest in both finding this book (I think it's still out of print, but far from rare) and reading it.

John Varley for many reasons is one of the best science fiction writers of his generation and The Ophiuchi Hotline is his first major work. Unlike many writers who do setting specific books (e.g. series) Varley makes no pretense about evolving his worlds or simply writing books in worlds that are very similar to each other. This is best exemplified in the later books Steel Beach and The Golden Globe, which relate to each other closely, while The Ophiuchi Hotline shares many of the same settings and ideas.

The Ophiuchi Hotline shows off Varley's talent for writing a different kind of science fiction with a different sort of styling. If you have a used book store in your area, that is probably the best route, though this laster reprint is nice also and one edition or the the should be on your bookshelf.

This is another of those books that I read shortly after it first appeared and have re-read every decade or so since. Though Varley had already made a reputation with a number of exceptional short stories, this was his first novel, and in many ways it laid the groundwork for most of his subsequent lengthier work: A future in which "The Invaders," an extrasolar species so very alien, humanity has little chance of ever understanding it, has stopped off on Earth to liberate the various cetacean races . . . which it regards as superior to humans and fungi. Ninety-nine percent of the human race died of starvation, leaving only the colonists in the Moon and the outer planets to carry the torch. A couple of centuries have now passed and Luna is carrying on business as usual. Lilo, a genetic engineer-entrepreneur, is in deep trouble for experimenting with human clones and has been sentenced to permanent death, but Boss Tweed, the out-of-office head of the Free Earthers (who dream of reclaiming the home planet), has other plans for her. Before long, there are several cloned versions of Lilo banging around the solar system, interacting with several other multiply-cloned persons, all of them illegal. Meanwhile, the beam-cast of technical information from a star in the constellation Ophiuchus has been interrupted by what seems to be a demand for payment for service. Varley has been called the successor to Heinlein, and he certainly has a knack for creative characterization and for casually spinning off startling and intriguing ideas.

Well, it's classic sf, so you get what you get. I think it's held up to the test of time pretty well so far. A very unique and interesting story, but I still don't get the ending. It was a quick wrap up that didn't make a whole lot of sense to me.

I love John Varley's books. I have read all of them now. I really, really wanted to totally love this book too. However, the book is just too jumpy. I was always getting lost and I don't like getting lost (and I hate to admit it since I'm a guy).

OK, unpronounceable name book does explain the premise behind _The_Steele_Beach_ and _The_Golden_Globe_. I gotta give it that, but, no four stars.

John Varley established himself as one of the important authors of speculative fiction in the US with this first work. In the same year as the first Star Wars film was released, Varley gave us this remarkable effort. Chapters are introduced with amusing capsule summaries at various levels of literacy (including references to comics and videos for the illiterate), ostensibly from the central computer, but the body of the story is told in natural, almost conversational language, making the startling ideas he presents seem all the more real and relevant.

A must-read for Varley fans, and a great introduction to his work for those who haven't experienced his writing.

_Dave_

I like Varley's shorter works more than his novels, but this one is an excception. Great story by itself, and fills in a lot of the backstory of his Eight Worlds where a lot of his short stories also take place.

Varly has many intresting notions about the future of thechnology, politics and genetical engineering. I recomend it.

There are two main ways to degrade humanity. First, you can compare humans to animals. Second, you can tear away human pretensions to the divine. Varley consistently does both throughout all his books, but never more so than here, "Demon" being the possible exception. Is the book still agood? Yeah, sure it is. Varley's imagination is fantastic, and he struts it like a peacock. But as a humanist, a REAL humanist, I find his view of humanity (as ordinary, even puny in the cosmic sense, helpless, vapid, dirty, animalistic) to be a constant depressant.

I'm not saying we should join hands and sing "Kumbaya" together; no not at all. But the idea of God or devil-like aliens kicking our [rears] for all eternity is depressing, I think you'd agree. It's ironic. Varley hates (hates!) religion, yet he sets the Jovians/dolphin hugging aliens up as gods of sorts. At least in "Demon" humans were sort of able to get a fair shot in at God.

Read William Christopher's "White Mountains" trilogy if you want some real action and real enjoyment in seeing humanity, with all its flaws, at its finest.