Author: John Varley
Publisher: Penguin
Rating: WORTHY!
In Steel Beach, a novel in Varley's "Eight Worlds" series, humans have been displaced from Earth by aliens. Earth and Jupiter are no-go zones, but humans are allowed to live anywhere else in the solar system.
The main character is Hildy Johnson, who is modeled after Rosalind Russell's role in the Howard Hawks 'screwball comedy' His Girl Friday. That role in the movie was originally written for a guy, but was given to Russell who took it and ran with it. Hildy is just as self-destructive as every other human, all of whom are living in overcrowded conditions and who are generally unhappy with the state of their existence. Hildy commits suicide several times and is fortuitously (from the perspective of others) revived. He/she also undergoes gender reassignments more than once.
After a lengthy and amusing introduction to existence in this solar system, Hildy finds a new interest in life after accidentally discovering someone wearing nothing - quite literally nothing, walking on the surface of the Moon - a person who then completely disappears as if by magic. Eventually this apparition leads to the uncovering of a group of people who have found the means to travel in space without protective craft or suits.
These people are in hiding, for obvious reasons, from the civilization's central computer system which it turns out, has been performing experiments on people, including Hildy, who learns that the computer has been cloning people in order to maintain population levels, which raises the question as to whether Hildy was actually saved from suicide, or was merely cloned (impractical as that is when you think about it).
This novel was highly inventive and entertaining. I loved the Hildy character and the cool ideas being freely tossed out like they were going out of style. The ending was kinda trite, but aceptable given the quality of the lead up to it.
