The Ophiuchi Hotline
Earth has been taken over by bizarre beings, and Man has made a new life on other planets, a strange life made possible by information provided by beings from Ophiuchi.
Stats for nerds
3recommend
4mentions
4people
2019–2025years
75% recommend25% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- This is one of the things I like most about his writing. In the scifi-whodunnit The Barbie Murders the concept of changing your body without too much trouble is used by a cult of people who all look exactly the same — lack of genitalia (i.e., 'Barbie'-like) included.
Varley wrote very much like Heinlein, but with the edgier parts of libertarianism shaved off.
Anyone looking for recommendations for reading Varley would do well to pick up some short story collections like The Persistence of Vision, The Barbie Murders, or Blue Champagne.
For a solid trilogy I can recommend the Gaea Trilogy (Titan, Wizard, and Demon), but that includes a lot of (fun!) cultural references which may be a tad harder on readers under 40.
His Eight Worlds books are great fun to read too. Pick up The Ophiuchi Hotline and see what you think to get a feel for those. These can be read independently of each other.
For young adults and anyone looking to read some scifi not quite as heavy and more reminiscent of Heinlein's juveniles, the Thunder and Lightning four book series is quite entertaining. One prescient social development he predicted there is that for an event you weren't present at to be believable (like something shown in a news broadcast or viral video) you would want a friend or a friend-of-a-friend to confirm it. If nobody was actually there, it was probably fake.
- It's an oldie (1977), but plays with some similar ideas and I think it really holds up: The Ophiuchi Hotline by John Varley.
- The Ophiuchi Hotline, by John Varley (and all the books that followed in the Eight Worlds Saga). Cloning, brain transfers, photosynthetic humans floating for millenia around saturn. I dedicated a significant fraction of my work career to implementing this (unsuccessfully, as you might imagine).
- To save you some scripting:
Alan Moore - dystopian graphic novel V for Vendetta (serialized 1982–1989) Alejandro Jodorowsky Jean Giraud (Moebius) - graphic novel The Incal (1980–1988) Anna Kavan - Ice (1967). Anne McCaffrey - The Ship Who Sang (1969) Arkady and Boris Strugatsky - Пикник на обочине (1972; Piknik na obochine; translated as A Roadside Picnic) Barry N. Malzberg - Beyond Apollo (1972) Brian Aldiss - Barefoot in the Head (1969) Brian Aldiss - Greybeard (1964). Chester Anderson - The Butterfly Kid (1967) Christopher Priest - Inverted World (1974) Cordwainer Smith - Norstrilia (1975, in complete form). David Bowie - The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972) Frank Herbert - Dune (1965) Frank Miller - graphic novel Rōnin (1983–1984) Gary Panter - comic Jimbo (serialized 1977–present) Gary Panter - comic strip Dal Tokyo (1983–2007) Gene Wolfe - The Fifth Head of Cerberus (1972) Harlan Ellison’s (ed.) Dangerous Visions (1967) Jack Kirby - Fourth World comics (1971–1974). Jack Kirby - pre-Fourth World sci-fi comics (1964–1970) James Tiptree Jr. - Up the Walls of the World (1978) Jane Gaskell - A Sweet, Sweet Summer (1969) J.G. Ballard - Crash (1973) J.G. Ballard - High-Rise (1975) J.G. Ballard - The Atrocity Exhibition (written 1967, published 1970) J.G. Ballard - The Burning World (1964) J.G. Ballard - The Crystal World (1966) Joanna Russ - We Who Are About To… (serialized 1976; in book form, 1977) John Brunner - Stand on Zanzibar (1968). John Brunner - The Sheep Look Up (1972) John Crowley - Engine Summer (1979) John Crowley - The Deep (1975). John Sladek - Roderick at Random (1983) John Sladek’s - The Müller-Fokker Effect (1970) John Varley - The Ophiuchi Hotline (1977) John Wagner, Alan Grant, and Carlos Ezquerra - Judge Dredd adventures Block Mania (serialized 10/31/1981 to 12/26/81) and The Apocalypse War (1/2/82 to 6/26/82). Josephine Saxton - The Hieros Gamos of Sam and An Smith (1969) Katsuhiro Otomo - manga series Akira (1982–1990) Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death (1969) Michael Moorcock - The English Assassin (1972) M. John Harrison - The Pastel City (1971) Moebius-s Le Garage Hermétique (The Airtight Garage, 1976–1979) Octavia E. Butler-s Kindred (1979) Octavia E. Butler - Wild Seed (1980) Philip K. Dick - A Maze of Death (1970) Philip K. Dick - A Scanner Darkly (1977) Philip K. Dick - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) Philip K. Dick - Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974). Philip K. Dick - Martian Time-Slip (1964) Philip K. Dick - Now Wait for Last Year (1966) Philip K. Dick - The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965) Philip K. Dick - The Unteleported Man (1966) Philip K. Dick - Ubik (1969). Philip K. Dick - VALIS (1981) Richard Brautigan - In Watermelon Sugar (1968). Robert Heinlein - Friday (1982). Robert Silverberg - Dying Inside (1972) Roger Zelazny - Lord of Light (1967) Russell Hoban - Riddley Walker (1980) Samuel R. Delany - Babel-17 (1966). Samuel R. Delany - Dhalgren (1975) Samuel R. Delany - Nova (1968) Samuel R. Delany - The Einstein Intersection (1967) Samuel R. Delany - Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia (1976) Stanislaw Lem - Ze wspomnien Ijona Tichego Kongres futurologiczny (The Futurological Congress, 1971) Thomas M. Disch - Camp Concentration (1968) Thomas Pynchon - Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) Ursula K. Le Guin - Rocannon's World (1966) Ursula K. Le Guin - The Dispossessed (1974). Ursula K. LeGuin - The Lathe of Heaven (1971) Ursula K. Le Guin - The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) Vladimir Nabokov - Ada, or Ardor (1969) Vonda N. McIntyre - Dreamsnake (1978) Walker Percy - Love in the Ruins (1971) William Burroughs - Nova Express (1964)
