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Overview: George Zebrowski’s philosophical science fiction novel Macrolife may be familiar to many SF fans. It certainly is full of ideas that have cropped up in other authors’ works. Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels, Octavia E. Butler’s Xenogenesis series, and Joe Haldeman’s Worlds Trilogy all came to mind while reading it. Zebrowski writes in the tradition of authors such as Olaf Stapledon, Alexei Panshin, and H. G. Wells. Like them, he is one of those writers who can shape the vision of a whole generation and plant the seeds of a hundred new ideas.
Originally published in 1979, Macrolife follows the saga of the Bulero family, from the twenty-first century through the eons to the inevitable collapse of the universe. The novel is broken into three separate sections, giving the reader a picture of three eras in the history of Macrolife.
Genre: Fiction > Sci-Fi/Fantasy
1 Macrolife: A Mobile Utopia
Scientist Dandridge M. Cole originated the term "Macro Life" in his 1961 book The Ultimate Human Society, though the idea of using asteroids as mobile "societal containers" is a common theme in science, and science fiction.
Cole defined Macro Life as "life squared per cell", i.e. "Macro Life is to man what man is to the cell".[1] Zebrowski, in the novel, regards Macrolife as an open-ended, expansive union of organic, cybernetic and machine intelligences (human and alien) with spacefaring as its means of dissemination.
Macrolife becomes a self-sustaining urban environment free from the restraints of planet-bound life, self-replicating and spreading throughout the universe with varying degrees of success.
However, we first meet Richard on the eve of a catastrophe that will forever change the course of Earth’s history. He is a young man and has not yet formed the philosophy of Macrolife. The Buleros are a wealthy family responsible for the discovery of a new wonder material known as bulerite. Along with thousands of other Earthlings, they flee the planet for the asteroid colony of Asterome when the disaster occurs. Next comes a brief tour of the solar system with more than a few obstacles and confrontations, until eventually Asterome leaves Earth’s sunspace to travel to other stars.
Jump ahead several centuries, and young John Bulero is experiencing growing pains in the confines of Asterome. He wishes to explore the nature of planet-bound existence and joins a tribe of agriculturalists after falling in love with one of its members. Here, his attempts to fit into the culture fail, and he returns to his world more troubled than before. Meanwhile, the rest of the Macroworld readies for a return trip to Earth’s solar system.
2. Cave of Stars
Old Earth is gone. Destroyed. The remnants of humanity live scattered among the stars.
Some abandoned the dying planet in starship arks, bound for new worlds. Others, nanoengineered for near immortality, live in macrolife mobiles, one-hundred-kilometer-long habitats that explore interstellar space.
On the planet Tau Ceti IV, the emigrants have fashioned an Earthlike society dedicated to conservatism and God, a theocratic regime where change is a crime and rebels are severely punished.
The macrolife habitats have their own rebels. Some seek a planet on which to start over. Others have retreated into the virtuals, where they will live as long as the cosmos itself, conveniently forgetting that nothing they experience, including themselves, is real. George Zebrowski, the bestselling author of Macrolife and Stranger Suns, has created a suspense-charged science fiction adventure in the grand tradition of Dune and Childhood’s End. It is an epic story of what happens when worlds collide — both figuratively and literally. A story that tells of the shattering conflict between a rebellious daughter and her fundamentalist father; between a man from the stars and the backward woman whose love endangers his immortality; between a world seeking redemption and a man seeking revenge.
Ondro is a rebel sentenced to be swept away by Tau Ceti’s monster storms. Josepha is the favored but unacknowledged daughter of New Vatican’s most powerful man. Voss is a visionary, seeding the universe with man-made worlds. And the Link is the artificial intelligence that binds them together as they embark on humankind’s most enduring adventure: the jump — into the darkness of an unknown future, out of the caveof stars….Cave of Stars, a companion work to Macrolife, is part of a mosaic of stories and novels about the future of space habitats, continuing the author’s lifelong interest in the many aims of human expansion beyond Earth.
Three Novelettes from Macrolife World (taken from the In the Distance, and Ahead in Time (2002) Collection)
Several other books have been written to take place in the same fictional world:
Transfigured Night and Wayside World, two novelettes published in 1978, are "set in the planned Macrolife mosaic of short stories, novelettes, novellas, and novels". Wayside World (part of a shared-universe project generated by Poul Anderson) was also the name of a chapter in the novel.
In the Distance, and Ahead in Time a Macrolife novelette, was published in Amazing Stories in 1993. It was also the title of his 10-story short-story collection of 2002.
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