The Ophiuchi Hotline - Book Review

 The Ophiuchi Hotline is a 1977 novel by John Varley.

I happened to get this one because of a book discount newsletter. Most days I just ignore it, but when I saw John Varley, I immediately went and bought it.

The story is interesting enough - it mostly covers a geneticist who is condemned to death, and then saved. She lives on the Moon - one of the 8 planets that have most of the remaining human race, after invaders took over the Earth. 

The geneticist is rescued by Tweed, who is dedicated to fighting the invaders and regaining Earth, and apparently have very soft ethical boundaries. She proceeds to get killed and cloned several times (I imagine no one will be impressed in SF by cloning by at this time, and they also have memory recordings).

Part of this tech was given to humans by the Ophiuchi Hotline, which is a signal that comes from 17 years away with lots of tech humans can use.

There are a lot of tech novelties like advanced surgery, nullfields and use of quantum black holes for energy and propulsion.

I was surprised when about 70% through when I realized that the reason a lot of the universe seemed familiar is that I had read (probably more than once) another book of the series - Steel Beach - back in the 90s. The tech on the book is pretty much excellent for a 1977 book - I wouldn't be surprised if it was from the late 90s.

Overall, excellent, specially when you consider the age.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

[Fixed] Just Cause 3 Mouse offset

I've sort of "fixed" my mouse offset problems and cursor exits from Just Cause 3. For whatever reason, both seem to happen sometime, specially if I need to change focus from the game. Sometimes just going to another app and returning solves it, otherwise if I go to Options, Graphics, and turn full screen back on (or turn it off and on again), it seems to get fixed. However, still annoying.
Read more

Solved - You have an incorrect version of driver "vmx86.sys" - VMWare Workstation 8

I have just installed VMWare Workstation 8 over my old VMWare Workstation 6.5 on Windows 7. On my first run I already got the error message: Could not get vmx86 driver version: The handle is invalid. You have an incorrect version of driver "vmx86.sys". Try reinstalling VMware Workstation. Failed to initialize monitor device. Obviously, I was concerned, but there is a simple way to solve it - just right-click the VMWare Workstation icon and use Run as Administrator. This is a bit annoying, but at least it is easy to solve. Update: I forgot to mention it, but as Dave said on the comments, you can right-click on the program shortcut, choose Properties, Compatibility tab and check Run as Administrator so that it will always run properly. Thanks, Dave!
Read more

Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is shaping our Future - Book Review

Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is shaping our Future - by Ashlee Vance - is a very entertaining biography about Elon Musk (which as the title says, is the biggest drive behind SpaceX and Tesla, and is also involved in SolarCity - all companies with possible huge effects in the world).  The story half reads as a bigger-than-life fictional account of what a genius industrialist goes through to save the world from pollution (with Tesla and SolarCity) and to get us into space. The fact that it all happened makes it even more interesting. It also made me really want to get a Tesla. Well, kind of... The triumphs really do, but the listings of problems don't (irrelevant either way as they are not available here)... Less revisions and "free" gas would be great, though. I'd also love to get cheap solar from SolarCity! Overall, very entertaining, and pretty much recommended for anyone interested in any of the companies.
Read more