Macrolife: A Mobile Utopia Book

I found this book on a list of specially priced books on Amazon.com. According to the description it was considered to be a science fiction classic - one of the more important science fiction books written in the past several decades. I was thrilled to have found it because I've been reading science fiction since I was a teen in the 1980's, and I'd read many of the classics during the course of my life. If there was one that I had missed then so-be-it. Time to catch up!

When I began Macrolife I quickly realized that the characters were going to be pretty thin - as in "not deep or robust". Honestly, I think that is indicative of many of the older science fiction authors including Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and Jack Williamson. And with additional honesty, that never bothered me. That crew wrote some amazing, thought-provoking books that I have appreciated greatly during the course of my reading life. However in the case of Macrolife, I didn't initially know what year it was published, so the whitewashed characters caught me off-guard. If it had been a more recent novel then it probably wouldn't have passed the critical requirements.

But as I read the story and the philosophy describing macrolife, which is largely based on the concepts of Dandridge Cole who suggested that we should use asteroids to make containers for ourselves and our societies so that we can move out to the stars in a new phase of societal evolution, I began to understand that the philosophy and scope of Macrolife were grand and deep. Interestingly though, it was the way, at an early point in the story, that the author George Zebrowski referred to the ship's computers that made me realize that the book was much older than I thought. For some reason, I'd initially thought it was from the late 90's or early 2000's.

Those were years when I was ramping up in my career and my ability to keep track of new authors and books suffered relative to my earlier years, from grade school through college, when I read voraciously and so found new authors and books on a regular basis. But when I saw the dated reference to computers I looked up the publication date and found that Macrolife had been published in 1979. That seemed strange to me because that was just prior to the years when I started reading everything I could get my hands on, from Dune to the HeeChee and Rendezvous with Rama. In those years I was learning about the masters and their most famous works. And in retrospect, I simply didn't recall having heard anything about George Zebrowski.

Was this because his last name started with a "Z" which meant that his books were likely on the bottom right shelf at all of the Waldenbooks and B. Dalton's where I used to buy my books in the 1980's? Or was it because Macrolife really didn't make that much of a stir back then.

In the end, it didn't matter, so I kept reading. I quickly understood the concepts of Macrolife as described by Zebrowski. Using Cole's ideas Zebrowski makes the point that "Macro Life is to man what man is to the cell." So if we move into space and live in growing and evolving asteroid homes, those worldlets become the life of space and we become the cells that make it work, grow, and progress. But I quickly began to realize that Zebrowski kept hammering away at the topic as if it were difficult to understand, when in fact I got it pretty early on.

Now, there's a strong chance that I "got it" because so many authors have since dealt with this kind of topic, and I've read so many of them that the idea seems very familiar to me. But even so, the book really, REALLY makes this point. Over and over and over. In fact, it makes the point to the detriment of the characters and in the end both characters are plot are as thin as onion skin while the philosophy comprises the bulk of the book.

At one point in the novel, a character who is a clone of an earlier character even sits down to read the writings of the nephew of his original self. The reading is yet another philosophical ramble about Macrolife and how it will/did change mankind. And the character reads the INTRO to the book which is incredibly long and which makes points that have been described already. I was really worried that the clone character would begin to read the actual book and then we'd be reading a book within a book and it would be telling us things that we already learned in the earlier portions of the real-world book. Luckily it didn't go so far.

In the end the story is broad and huge and takes us from Earth in 2021 all the way to the end of our universe and into the next universe that is born after ours ends. It is full of neat concepts and ideas that, in my opinion, have been explored by many other authors since Macrolife was written. I see echoes of Zebrowski's ideas coming forth in more modern writers such as Peter F. Hamilton, Iain Banks, and Alastair Reynolds.

But I have to wonder if those are really echoes. Did those authors read Macrolife? Did it change their minds about human potential, or give them ideas about how to describe a potential path for humanity in space? Or, in fact, are these concepts so simple and straightforward (at least in theory) that they can be considered obvious? My suspicion is that the latter may be true. I'm not certain that Zebrowski has "defined" anything so much as he might be one of the early adopters of this concept. But when I realized that Arthur C. Clarke wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968 (and actually was building on stories from much earlier), then I also realized that Zebrowski wasn't really doing original work. So factor that in with weak characterization and a nominal plot I found Macrolife to be less-than-astonishing and, in fact, very preachy. It could have dropped 100 pages and suffered very little.

I do realize that I'm jaded since I'm writing this from 2014. Maybe this book had an impact on some writers or other thought leaders that are doing work today. If so, that's great. But I'd rather read those authors now since they are able to integrate the science that we know or theorize today. Macrolife is dated, and probably best serves as an example of the mindset from 1979. But the impact it may have on today is limited by its peculiarity to a world that is 35 years in the past. It's a long, repetitive read and I think there are other books that explore the concept more deeply that are more accessible to today's readers.