The eponymous hotline, which is operated by similarly displaced interstellar exiles, beams data through the solar system, the last item being a message that humanity will soon be banned from its home system, and will be doomed to wander the stars, homeless, for ever. The sense of ongoing process – and of an identity-dissolving taste for metamorphosis – is incessant. The protagonist is in fact several successive clones of the same person, the original dying only a few pages into the text and new versions of that original – clone bodies with pre-recorded mind-tapes of the original plugged in at the point of awakening – taking over when needed. Bioengineered and variously cloned, humans now subscribe to social and sexual codes – and live within perspectives and according to processes – that differ radically from those of their flesh-bound, planet-bound ancestors. This sense of currency was also a feature of Varley's first – and perhaps finest – novel, The Ophiuchi Hotline ( 1977), set 500 years into his Future History – it is sometimes called the Eight Worlds sequence, though there are deliberate internal inconsistencies – at a time when humanity has been long exiled from Earth by immensely superior, indifferent "Invaders". Varley's shorter works brought him three Hugos – for "The Persistence of Vision" (March 1978 F&SF) in 1979, "The Pusher" (October 1981 F&SF) in 1982 and "PRESS ENTER _" (May 1984 Asimov's 1990 chap dos) in 1985 – and two Nebulas – for "The Persistence of Vision" and "PRESS ENTER _". The pessimism implicit in his assumption that Homo sapiens might be exiled for cause from the home planet they had desecrated was laced through with an optimism derived directly, it seems, from the work of Robert A Heinlein. Urgent and risk-taking, the stories assembled in The Persistence of Vision (coll 1978 vt In the Hall of the Martian Kings 1978) and The Barbie Murders (coll 1980 vt Picnic on Nearside 1984) seemed to announce the shape of sf's response to the end of the twentieth century. The image of an incessantly humming solar system – it is central to books like Michael Swanwick's Vacuum Flowers ( 1987) – owes as much to Varley as it does to the idioms of Cyberpunk. It may have been the case that many previous Space Operas, especially those claiming galactic scope, were set far from the home planet (which was often "forgotten"), but Varley's innovation was twofold: to bring the displacement close to the present day, into a Near-Future setting that made it more vivid, and to present a subsequent Solar System whose own complexity seemed to mark a genuine evolutionary shift – in fictional terms – from the old geocentricity. He was fresh, he was complex, he understood the imaginative implications of transformative developments like cloning (see Clones), many of his protagonists were women (see Women in SF), and most of the stories he told were set within an overall background Universe whose centre of geography had been startlingly displaced – in a manner characteristic of the finest sf – from Earth itself. (1947- ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Picnic on Nearside" for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in August 1974 and who was soon thought to be the most significant new writer of the late 1970s.
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