The Ophiuchi Hotline (1977, USA), John Varley’s debut novel, is one of my favourite science fiction novels, and I’ve read it a number of times. (And yes, I now own a signed first edition of it.) Varley’s Eight Worlds has been one of my favourite fictional universes (or, at least, Solar System) since I first came across it in The Barbie Murders (1980, USA), AKA Picnic on Nearside, the first book by him I read. (And yes, a couple of his stories are favourites too, particularly the title story of the collection mentioned earlier, and ‘Air Raid’, which was extended into a novel, Millennium (1983, USA), and then made into a movie, Millennium (1989), but I think the novelisation was prompted by the film project.)
Anyway, The Ophiuchi Hotline...
In the universe of the novel, alien creatures who live in gas giants invaded Earth to save its resident intelligent species, the cetaceans, and only those humans resident off-Earth, on the Moon, for example, survived. Humanity has since spread out to colonise the other planets and moons in the Solar System, chiefly thanks to a number of scientific advances taken from a radio broadcast transmitted from somewhere in the vicinity of 70 Ophiuchi, 16.6 light-years from Earth. This is the “hotline” of the title, a steady stream of advanced science and technology from… who?
The hero of the novel is Lilo (an unfortunate choice of name to a British reader), a genetic engineer who is sentenced to death for experimenting on the human genome. Just before her sentence is carried out, she’s rescued by Boss Tweed, the mayor of Luna, who also runs a secret organisation dedicating to regaining Earth from the Invaders. A clone dies in Lilo’s place. Lilo finds herself working in a secret laboratory hidden in orbit about Jupiter. But she has also taken precautions should her experiments draw the wrath of the authorities, and has stashed another clone in orbit about Saturn.
The Ophiuchi Hotline is part travelogue, as various clones of Lilo flit about the Solar System, learning how it has been settled by humanity after the Invasion, part conspiracy thriller as Boss Tweed and his organisation attempt to retake Earth, and part mystery since a bill for “services rendered” has just been issued by whoever it is that’s been sending all that ever so useful data from Ophiuchi…
One of the reasons I rate The Ophiuchi Hotline so highly is that I seem to find something new in it every time I read it. It’s a 1970s sf novel, but it’s also very much ahead of its time. Changes of gender are commonplace in it, and so identity is not linked to gender, but still gender is linked to biological sex (not a modern attitude, although it tries). Body modification is unremarkable, and in some cases even considered professionally desirable. The block on human genome experimentation, however, feels weirdly authorially imposed — given everything else in the novel, it seems bizarrely fundamentalist and likely plot-driven, a feeling only further strengthened by the eventual reveal that much of the hotline data concerned genetic engineering.
Varley’s fiction in the 1970s challenged a number of commonly-held attitudes. Not only did he downgrade “mankind” from the number one spot in the universe, but he also downgraded man from the number one spot in society (US society, of course). His fiction is not feminist, since it ignores the fact there is a struggle, but it did build a world in which the argument was entirely moot. And Varley was as good as his word — he showed a universe in which arguments over sex and gender have no force, and he remained consistent. To be fair, the short story mentioned earlier, ‘The Barbie Murders’, is predicated not only on a binary view of sex but also on stereotypical presentations of gender, which is sort of the story’s point, but it doesn’t map all that well onto 2022 sensibilities. But I digress…
On this particular read, I was surprised to see how convincing were Varley’s descriptions of orbital mechanics. Of all things. I suspect I’ve long since internalised the more obvious aspects of his Eight Worlds, and certainly on my last reread back in 2007, I found myself surprised at the sheer number of ideas Varley threw out in the last few chapters of The Ophiuchi Hotline. This time, it seems, it was the verisimilitude of the physical Solar System Varley had created which struck me most.
It has been close to forty years since I first read The Ophiuchi Hotline, and I’ve reread it a least three or four times since. I’m not a great one for rereading novels, and there’s barely a handful I reread on a semi-regular basis. Some, I admit, I reread more by accident than by design — Dune (1966, USA) by Frank Herbert would be a good example. Samuel R Delany’s Dhalgren (1975, USA), on the other hand, I reread because I love the book.
The Ophiuchi Hotline… I appreciate once again each time I reread it. It’s a favourite sf novel, and has yet to be poisoned by subsequent rereads (it happens, you know). I think it’s a good sf novel… for 1977. I think it transcends its time of writing to a certain degree. But I don’t think it is 2020-proof — that is, I don’t think it holds up entirely well to present-day sensibilities. Yet its failures are as interesting as its successes in that regard, so perhaps I should indeed say: go ahead, track it down and read it.
The Ophiuchi Hotline is one of those science fiction novels that is not a great novel but is a great science fiction novel, and it’s one of the few science fiction novels where the latter outweighs for the former. That, I think, should be cause for celebration, or at the very least notability.
