Reviews for Macrolife: A Mobile Utopia

The average rating for Macrolife: A Mobile Utopia based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-09-08 00:00:00 Suzanne Lewis A shamefully underknown philosophical SF novel, sporting a bold, scintillating premise that will stimulate, expand, and ultimately BLOW your mind.   George Zebrowski, underheralded expander of horizons, flexed his ambition and penned a "reach for it," tour de force story, fashioned around a straightforward, but fascinating idea, described as follows on the Novel's opening page:  This concept of a new life form which I call Macro Life and Isaac Asimov calls "multi-organismic life" serves as a convenient shorthand whereby the whole collection of social, political, and biological problems facing the future space colonist may be represented with two-word symbols. It also communicates quickly an appreciation for the similar problems which are rapidly descending on the whole human race. Macro Life can be defined as "life squared per cell." Taking man as representative of multicelled  life we can say that man is the mean proportional between Macro Life and the cell, or Macro Life is to man as man is the cell. Macro Life is a new life form of gigantic size which has for its cells, individual human beings, plants, animals, and machines. . . . society can be said to be pregnant with a mutant creature which will be at the same time an extraterrestrial colony of human beings and a new large scale life form. Nothing less than the next (and final) evolution of humanity into its most perfect, and almost unimaginable composition. Yeppers, this is big stage science fiction at its most audacious, in the mold of Stapledon, Wells and van Vogt. I might as well warn you now...brain swell from idea overload is a distinct possibility.     PLOT SUMMARY The novel is cut into 3 segments, the first commencing in 2021, then jumping to the year 3000, and finally extending into some unfathomable distant future to witness the end of the universe. Beginning in 2021, Zebrowski draws a picture of a "sun space" economy, in which the Moon, Mars and Ganymede have been colonized, and a 10 mile X 5 mile hollowed out asteroid, Asterdome, roams the inner solar system conducting scientific research. This latter will eventually become the first Macrolife. While this kind of near future is familiar territory for SF fans, Zebrowski does a good job grounding this "soon to be" with a genuineness that provides firm, steady foundation for the huge leaps to come.  This first section is designed to introduce us to a familiar world that we can easily relate to...a world that is soon ripped away from us in the wake of a well constructed catastrophe. The tragedy, caused by (nope, no spoilers here), devastates the planet, leading to an end to Earth as the center of humanity's future.  In the wake if this apocalypse, the self-sufficient and mobile Asterdome becomes the future of the human race.  Good politics, good technology, some interesting family dynamics. A good opening section.   Flash to the year 3000, where macrolife (i.e., mobile, independent, self sustaining, self-replicating colonies) have become the dominant form of human development and expansion. In this section, we observe one such colony as it (1) prepares to give "birth" to a new macrolife, (2) encounters a "dirt-side" civilization of humanity and (3) wrestles with the deep divide that has grown between macroworlders and dirtworlders in physical, psychological, and intellectual development, as well as prejudices, biases and cultural conceits that continue to exist.  There is a lot of "wow" in this section, and Zebrowski's scientific cred is on full display here as he throws out big ideas without drowning the reader in an overabundance of technobabble.  Finally, we are time-warped to a future so distant as to be completely unrecognizable, and a version of humanity that is equally estranged from our present notions of ourselves. I don't want to go into details, but do want to remind you of the potential for serious mind tumefaction and psyche bulging. Best to have a cold compress handy while reading this final section.  THOUGHTS: Overall, amazed that this novel is not held in higher esteem as one of the more unique, ambitious novels of the period. When Zebrowski is writing filler and dialogue, he is competent, if not memorable. I would call these parts serviceable, but not worthy of major applause.  However, when he is getting his science on and addressing the meatiest parts of his story, both in terms of technology and in the psychological evolution of humanity, Zebrowski is mesmerizing. He calls to mind big, mold-breaking thinkers like Olaf Stapledon, A.E. van Vogt and H.G. Wells, and in some ways outstrips even their most intrepid extrapolations.     This is a story that should be read. If you haven't read Zebrowski before, you should really give him a try. Macro story, macro ideas, macro awesome. 4.0 to 4.5 stars. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-06-23 00:00:00 Chris Bierbaum 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.