Faster than light travel is not (as yet) possible, though it is mentioned that test-flights will begin soon at the end of The Golden Globe, and the species has not as yet managed to extend itself to other stars.
Instant sex changes are considered a matter of fashion, rather than gender identity, and many long-standing human sexual taboos no longer exist.
The Eight Worlds story "Overdrawn at the Memory Bank", published in 1976, was adapted into a TV movie in 1984 starring Raul Julia.
Varley has written that the Eight Worlds background should be regarded as a group of common characters and situations that appear in different stories rather than a single consistent setting.
The novelette "Blue Champagne" has Bach as a minor character, working as a lifeguard in "The Bubble", a giant globe of water held in zero-gravity conditions on a resort satellite for the enjoyment of rich tourists.
In notes contained within The John Varley Reader, the author explains that he created Anna Louise Bach for stories which were too grim for the relative Utopia of the Eight Worlds series.
In fact, even within the Anna Louise Bach stories there are inconsistencies, such as the appearance of the fabulous "Mozartplatz" in "Tango Charlie and Foxtrot Romeo", where a huge chasm on Luna is roofed over producing cubic miles of pressurized space featuring aerial communities, artificial rivers etc.
The other stories portray Luna society as living in cramped tunnels, although "Bagatelle" does take place partially on a golf course in a large cavern.
Megan Galloway first appears in "Blue Champagne" and then in "Tango Charlie and Foxtrot Romeo", linking her with Anna Louise Bach in both.
[clarification needed] In "Blue Champagne" she is a "trans-sister", a quadraplegic who leads a celebrity lifestyle with the aid of a sophisticated device that enfolds her entire body in a net of golden alloy threads, which move her limbs for her.
In Steel Beach, she is also mentioned as one of the "Gigastars" enshrined by the Flacks - a bizarre celebrity cult - who later regret this choice, when feelies go out of fashion.
In "Tango Charlie" she has shed the device, undergone surgery to restore her nervous system, and uses her money and influence to help Anna Louise Bach with her stuttering career and her current case.
In "Beatnik Bayou" he actually regresses physically to the age of the child and grows up at the same rate, keeping his adult mentality, but an incident results in him being professionally disgraced.
Parameter is a woman who, after a life of debauchery fueled by inherited money, tries the only untried experience left, that of half of a symbiotic pair living among the rings of Saturn, as described in the story "Equinoctial".
The vermin inevitably attempt to regain control of their planet and are forced out of their home systems, to live between the stars where other displaced intelligences are already in residence.
Free Earthers are intransigently unreconciled to the loss of Humanity's original world and are committed to continued resistance to the invaders and eventual liberation of Earth.
The novel Steel Beach introduces the "Heinleiners," a group of idealists and freethinkers attempting to build a starship while following a kind of extreme libertarianism.
[citation needed] Their primary inventor and "leader" uses the pseudonym "Valentine Michael Smith", a reference to the main character of the same name from Heinlein's novel Stranger in a Strange Land.
A variant on the "force field" idea, the nullfield can wrap any object or volume in a shell which cannot be penetrated by anything, except gravity and certain kinds of light.
Two nullfields can merge, allowing people wearing them to touch each other, making for a way of passing the time when buried alive, waiting to be rescued.
The struggle is expected to last for millennia as each side tries to out-populate the other, often by kidnapping each other's children - and it seems the rest of the Eight Worlds are content to let them continue their war, no one trying to stop it and make peace.
If the demands of the Hotline operators are not met, the Symb Pairs will transform into unstoppable warriors capable of destroying all human space habitats.
In The Ophiuchi Hotline a character known as "Javelin" takes modification to extremes by having only one arm and one leg, with a "ped", at opposite corners of a slim body.
In The Ophiuchi Hotline, it is revealed that the law provides for a sentence of "death with immediate reprieve" where a criminal is killed and a clone is revived with memories from before the commission of the crime.
In the story "Overdrawn at the Memory Bank" a man's personality is recorded and placed in the brain of a lioness in one of the wildlife reserves on Luna.
A single black hole, when dragged back into the system and installed in a power station, would be enough for a prospector to live in wealth for the rest of his or her life.
The protagonist of "Tar Baby", who discovers it and survives, has very good reasons to keep the knowledge to herself and avoid drawing attention to what she had been doing in the far reaches of space.
The aliens who run the Hotline recognize this as a singularity that can be used to nullify mass and momentum, providing the means to create a low-fuel interstellar drive.
In the Author's Note of Steel Beach, Varley states: This story appears to be part of a future history of mine, often called the Eight Worlds.
The reason for this is simple: the thought of going back, rereading all those old stories, and putting them in coherent order filled me with ennui... Steel Beach is not really part of the Eight Worlds future history.