While toddling towards the stars humanity stumbles across a SETI signal lasering through Saturn's rings. Bursting with bytes, dense with data, mostly incomprehensible but what can be deciphered is remaking human civilization as fast as the patents can be stamped. The sirens of technology are calling on the Ophiuchi Hotline. The second contact arrives in the Sol system via asteroid. They commune with their gas giant cousins on Jupiter, then briefly turn their attention to Earth.
Resistance proves irrelevant.
In a matter of days all Earth-bound human infrastructure is utterly destroyed while Homo sapiens elsewhere in the solar system hunker down and hope to avoid notice. But in John Varley's universe there are no problems, just opportunities in disguise. Humans don't need Earth. By the chronologically earliest Eight Worlds story human kind is thriving on barren worlds remade in their own images of Paradise. Journey with us now into the future of the Eight Worlds.