The Ophiuchi Hotline is part of a group of stories set in a future in which the Invaders have forced humanity off of Earth. The short stories usually use this imaginative future as background for themes and ideas that relate to developments in society and technology during the 1970s and 1980s.

For instance, "Overdrawn at the Memory Bank" (1976) is a funny tale of a person, Fingal, whose personality is accidentally trapped inside a computer.