| Date: 14 April 2011, 17:37
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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.
On Earth, a race called only Invaders has destroyed all human technology in the year 2050, so that the remaining people there 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.
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.
[edit] Plot summary
This article's plot summary may be too long or overly detailed. Please help improve it by removing unnecessary details and making it more concise. (October 2007)
Lilo is a rebel geneticist living on Luna. Violating the laws of the Eight Worlds, she has experimented with human DNA, using money she received from her legal work on such creations as the Bananameat tree. As the story opens, she is facing execution. Her cell is quite luxurious, more like a hotel room. Her only inconvenience is isolation, and being used as a subject in criminology classes.
On the eve of her execution, she is visited by the person she knows as Boss Tweed, the most powerful politician in Luna. (He has evidently taken up this name in deliberate emulation of the crooked 19th Century New York politician William M. Tweed, and is even mentioned as having named his Lunar headquarters "Tammany Hall".)
Accompanying Tweed is a formidable bodyguard and Lilo's own clone, fresh out of the growth tank with a full set of Lilo's memories. Tweed offers Lilo a deal - she can escape and the clone will die, or vice versa. It's never clear which she chooses, because the next scenes show one Lilo committing suicide in the prison and another going free with Tweed. Whichever it is, the corpse goes into the Hole, a captive black hole which serves as a power plant for Luna, generating energy from garbage tossed into it.
Lilo learns she is to become a cog in Tweed's machine, to be trained for use in Tweed's schemes to strike back at the Invaders. Like all Lunarians she will periodically record her memories for restoration into a clone should her body die. The first time she does this with Tweed, the next experience recorded is being revived and told that she has been killed twice, for escaping from Tweed. She is, in fact, the third clone Tweed has made of Lilo. Thus Lilo resolves to be much more careful.
At this point, as in other stories involving the brain-recording and cloning processes (e.g. The Phantom of Kansas in The Persistence of Vision) the reader may wonder what personal identity means when bodies and memories can be rebuilt as needed. The novel elaborates even more on this theme until hinting that there is more to it than simple biochemistry, towards the end.
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