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''The Ophiuchi Hotline'' is a Locus nominated〔(【引用サイトリンク】 1978 Award Winners & Nominees )〕 1977 science fiction novel by John Varley. It opens in the year 2618. ==Background to the author's work== The novel both introduces and finalizes the story elements of Varley's Eight Worlds series which are further explained in other novels and short stories, which explore earlier stages of the story of humanity, post-2050. In the year 2050, a race called only Invaders has destroyed all human technology on Earth, so that the remaining people on the planet exist at a stone-age level. The rest of humanity survives on all available solid bodies in the solar system with the aid of a technology derived from information in the Ophiuchi Hotline, a radio signal apparently beamed from the star 70 Ophiuchi. They live mostly underground on bodies such as Luna, Mars, Venus, Mercury, and Pluto. There are no settlements on the moons of Jupiter, because the Invaders live in the atmosphere of that planet. Using Symbiotic Spacesuits ("Symbs"), thousands of humans also enjoy an odd existence floating in the rings of Saturn. The Invaders' purpose is simple - they recognize two kinds of intelligent life: themselves, evolving in the atmospheres of planets like Jupiter, and sea-living mammals like whales and dolphins. Humans and other tool-users qualify only as vermin. They reduced humanity to the stone-age (starving billions to death in the process) to protect the whales and dolphins. A major political division among the space-bound humans is the division between "Free Earthers" who seek to go on fighting the Invaders and liberate the home planet, and their opponents who feel that provoking the incomparably powerful Invaders would be both foolhardy and dangerous. Important technological elements of the stories are cloning and the ability to record memories and restore them to a brain at a later date. There is also advanced surgery used for cosmetic body alteration. Everyone is fitted with a data port which allows them to be interrogated by computer. They can also have their nervous system shut down selectively for surgery. Many people change sex on a whim. Others choose to exist without sex at all. One result of the universal possibility of creating a clone of a dead person is that murder has gone down in importance, being considered a second-rate crime rather than the heinous act it is in our society - since the victim would be revived, and the murderer has only deprived him or her of a few months' memories and experiences. The possibility of cloning is, however, strictly limited to reviving a dead person. For the sake of keeping the population down, it is absolutely forbidden to make a copy of a living person. Upon discovery, such an "illegal copy" - who is as much of a living, feeling human being as the "original" - must be destroyed immediately. Therefore, illegally made clones have no recourse to law and are in effect at the mercy of whoever created them - a point of central importance to the plot. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「The Ophiuchi Hotline」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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