I find myself flummoxed with how to describe my opinions on this mostly-forgotten oddball space opera. Perhaps it sounds strange, but this is one of the best 2.5/5 novels I've ever read. Quirky, rough around the edges, wildly creative, and exactly as uneven as one would expect from an author's first novel length work. Despite my reservations I do hold out some hope that Varley's later work can maintain his weirdness while polishing up his tendency in The Ophiuchi Hotline towards messiness.
Similar to Cordwainer Smith's Norstrilia, The Ophiuchi Hotline is set in a broader universe that is mostly explored through short stories. Though to be fair to Smith, it seems Varley couldn't be bothered to maintain as much chronological consistency when he returned to the universe in novels he published at the tail end of his career.
In this "Eight Worlds" universe, humanity has been evicted from Earth by an opaque higher intelligence for reasons that remain unknown. A similar species is found to live within the gas stratosphere of Jupiter, providing for consistence stress among the human colonies spread across the other planets in our solar system. Unsurprisingly, there is a contingent of humans who want to liberate Earth and return it to its former glory, though it remains unclear how they could do so. Humanity has only found the ability to traverse the solar system and inhabit the less-than-ideal niches they found because of the eponymous Ophiuchi Hotline, a stream of scientific data and technological advancements curiously beamed to us from outside our neck of the galaxy. The characters, though there are relatively few of them, are mostly clones of a few individuals; highly illegal too, since tampering with human genetics is banned with a legal punishment of death.
Varley's exploration of the ramifications of cloning was certainly solid; one of the best parts of the book for me. There's also some early-ish examples of cyberpunk technology, specifically towards the beginning of the novel, that I though were interesting and exciting. I wish I could say the same about Varley's exploration of gender fluidity (which is mostly defined/changed by cultural fads), or the curious inclusion of a reference to a corrupt political leader from 1860's New York (William "Boss" Tweed), the true purpose of which could've gone right over my head.
There's a truly sophomoric prevalence of casual sex and genital touching as is seemingly promised by any new wave SF that contains a sexually liberated culture. Most of the time this kind of thing makes me cringe, but for some reason it came off as really unintentionally funny to me in this one.
After its perplexing conclusion (which highlights the importance of human culture in a crowded galaxy and introduces some properties of time that go unexplained), I found myself asking what the point of it all was. Sure, it was entertaining in a funny/ridiculous way (see any mention of pork chop trees), but in my opinion it fails to coalesce into anything of real substance. Honestly though, gun to my head, I'd be hard pressed to define why my rating is so different between this and something like The Fall of Chronopolis by Barrington J. Bayley, which has lots of the same pitfalls and strengths. Perhaps it comes down to this type of inventive pulp genre fiction needing the right moment or circumstances. That may be true for any type of media, but it might be especially true for something like weird SF that relies so heavily on reader by-in. Nonetheless, it clearly inspired some thought in me which is more than I can say for a lot of stuff, so it's probably worth a try for the right person.
BigEnk
