John Varley's "Eight Worlds" series

            John Varley’s “Eight Worlds” stories take place in a future history in which aliens have expelled humankind from the Earth and destroyed all traces of our works, with frightening ease, apparently on behalf of the dolphins and whales.  Mankind barely survives due to the existence of a small colony on the moon, and over the centuries, colonies grow up on moons and planets from Mercury to Pluto and beyond.  The society that grows up is advanced technologically, particularly in the biological sciences (a person can change sex in an outpatient procedure), but the loss of Earth and the ease of mankind’s defeat by the aliens take a long-term psychological toll.  Varley closed out the series with a novel (The Ophiuchi Hotline) in the 1980s.  Very unusually, Varley later wrote two novels Steel Beach and The Golden Globe, which have a background very similar to that of the Eight World stories, but are (acknowledged by Varley) not to be completely consistent with the older stories.  Varley apparently simply had a theme that fit in very well with most of the Eight Worlds background, but not all of it, so he threw out what he couldn’t use and used what fit.  Most authors wouldn’t do that, but it certainly worked.  For information about the series, http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Rampart/3870/ seems like a good site.