Macrolife: A Mobile Utopia

Macrolife: A Mobile Utopia

by George Zebrowski
Macrolife: A Mobile Utopia

Macrolife: A Mobile Utopia

by George Zebrowski

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Overview

Subtitled “A Mobile Utopia,” this pioneering novel about the meaning of space habitats for human history, presents spacefaring as no work did in its time, and since. A utopian novel like no other, presenting a dynamic utopian civilization that transcends the failures of our history. 

Epic in scope, Macrolife opens in the year 2021. The Bulero family owns one of Earth’s richest corporations. As the Buleros gather for a reunion at the family mansion, an industrial accident plunges the corporation into a crisis, which eventually brings the world around them to the brink of disaster. Vilified, the Buleros flee to a space colony where young Richard Bulero gradually realizes that the only hope for humanity lies in macrolife—mobile, self-reproducing space habitats.
 
A millennium later, these mobile communities have left our sunspace and multiplied. Conflicts with natural planets arise. John Bulero, a cloned descendant of the twenty-first century Bulero clan, falls in love with a woman from a natural world and experiences the harshness of her way of life. He rediscovers his roots when his mobile returns to the solar system, and a tense confrontation of three civilizations takes place.
 
One hundred billion years later, macrolife, now as numerous as the stars, faces the impending death of nature. Regaining his individuality by falling away from a highly evolved macrolife, a strangely changed John Bulero struggles to see beyond a collapse of the universe into a giant black hole.
 
Inspired by the possibilities of space settlements, projections of biology and cosmology, and basic human longings, Macrolife is a visionary speculation on the long-term future of human and natural history. Filled with haunting images and memorable characters, this is a vivid and brilliant work.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781497634176
Publisher: Open Road Media
Publication date: 04/08/2014
Series: Macrolife , #1
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 382
Sales rank: 415,962
File size: 2 MB

About the Author

George Zebrowski’s more than forty books include novels, short fiction collections, anthologies, and a collection of essays.
 
His short fiction, articles, and essays have appeared in Omni magazine, Asimov's Science FictionAmazing Stories, the Magazine of Fantasy & Science FictionInterzoneScience Fiction AgeNature, the Bertrand Russell Society News, and many other publications. “Heathen God” was nominated for a Nebula Award in 1972. 
 
Brute Orbits (1998), an uncompromising novel about the future of the penal system, was honored with the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and Stranger Suns (1991) was a New York Times Notable Book.


George Zebrowski is a science fiction author and editor who has written and edited a number of books, and is a former editor of The Bulletin of the Science Fiction Writers of America. Zebrowski received the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 1999 for his novel Brute Orbits, and several of his short stories have been nominated for the Nebula Award. He lives with author Pamela Sargent, with whom he has co-written a number of novels, including Star Trek novels.

Read an Excerpt


MACROLIFE

A MOBILE UTOPIA



By GEORGE ZEBROWSKI
Prometheus Books
Copyright © 1979

George Zebrowski
All right reserved.



ISBN: 978-1-59102-341-8



Chapter One Lives

The earth pulled him down, tugging at him like a burdensome friend. Richard Bulero felt trapped as he looked up at the stars, cut off from the openness of space. Earth's turbulent ocean of air was the cloudy lens of a giant eye, sun-blinded by day, astigmatic by night. Even here in the desert, the stars lacked the brilliance he had come to know on the moon.

The planet was nervously alive around him, enveloping his body in an aura of sounds, smells, and dust, pushing against his skin, trying to make him fit in again. The physical adjustments of coming home were a nuisance; his adaptation to Luna's gentle pull conflicted with his muscle-memory of earth's stronger attraction, even though he had kept in shape through exercise.

He missed the moon's stillness. A year at Plato University had made him a stranger on the home world, and at home.

He had not come back to New Mexico just to attend this evening's party for his father and Bulero Enterprises. Margot had been first in his plans, and he was anxious to get away from the celebration as soon as possible. He had not seen her for over six months, ever since she had completed her field work on the moon and had returned to Princeton to continue her studies in biology.

He was looking forward to personal talks with his uncle Sam and with Orton Blackfriar; they would at least notice his progress. Sam's courses in philosophy had been the brightest part of his first two years at Princeton, opening his mind to problems beyond those of family and self-concern. Sam and Orton would be in New York during the next two weeks, and he had a dinner date with them. He would stay with Margot until then, and return to the moon by the first of May.

He was impatient for the party to be over. Richard turned away from the terrace railing and hesitated. There was no point in going back inside; his parents were monopolizing Sam and Orton, and he had lost his taste for starting pointless conversations with strangers. He was tired of playing the promising son of a man who had not spoken to him for most of the evening and whose presence seemed to destroy the possibility of genuine conversation.

Richard took a deep breath of the night air. He stretched, feeling a pleasant ache as his muscles adjusted to the earth's pull. It was like coming back to life. Nevertheless, the dry, starry silence of the walled lunar plain at Plato made possible a clarity of thought which was missing here. There he could look out into the vast cave of stars with a measured emotion, with a sense of the future, while here on earth his thoughts longed for sunlight and warm water, and lovemaking. There the lunar shadows were sharp, eliciting clear distinctions in his mind, cutting away the jungle growth of his emotions; here his feelings grew in a jumble, obscuring his goals, weakening him.

He missed the spirit of consensus among Plato's scientists and teachers, as well as the cooperativeness of the lunar colonists; it was the same, he had been told, among the L-5 colonists of Asterome, and on Mars and Ganymede. The colonies were a new branch of humanity, joined to their environment through a problem-solving struggle which demanded of them the resolve to work through disagreements to the best possible conclusion, whatever that might turn out to be; the openness of free space was matched by the openness of inquiring minds. Failure in maintaining this attitude could result in costly disasters and loss of life.

Those who lived permanently on the moon, Mars, or Ganymede, could never return to the high gravity of earth without powered external support harnesses or wheelchairs; much of this growing population had no desire ever to visit earth. Asterome maintained an earthlike gravity, but even so the colonists had more in common with sunspace humanity than with earth. He wondered if he and Margot could cut themselves off from earth, begin a new life elsewhere in the solar system's growing family of environments; he wondered if he could ever cut himself off from the fact of his family name.

How will I ever introduce Margot? he asked himself as he started toward the terrace door. He stopped again, startled by the thought that he did not know what his parents were like within themselves. He knew their faces, the gaze of their eyes, their manner of speech and dress; but he did not know them as he knew Margot. He had never known anyone as he knew Margot. He knew Sam; Orton was easy to understand.

Margot was lucky not to have her parents; her past was gone, leaving her free to grow in her own way, without having to measure herself by it constantly. The past was not conspiring to enlist her in its service; his was waiting to swallow him with its complexities of money and responsibility. He knew that he might never be able to accomplish anything to match the wealth of his family or its corporate power. His intellectual and scientific achievements would be respected only if they resulted in practical consequences; a treatise, or a theory, would not be enough. Even his mother, who missed him genuinely, took little notice of his work in philosophy and science.

There had been a time, only a few years ago, when he and Sam could still get above their lives in discussion; they could stand off, independent and all knowing, from the family's affairs, and talk about the dangers to personal happiness and achievement posed by the past. Sam Bulero had taken the most painful path, selling his shares in the company after setting up an annuity. His brother, Jack, made constant fun of him for this, even though the annuity provided Sam with less than what Princeton paid him. Sam's work, however, was real, and a source of enduring fame. Jack Bulero was an elaborate fake, but known as such only to family and close associates. My father, Richard thought. Not an evil man, just someone who's not what he claims to be.

How long before I put my hand in to take a share? In time Richard Bulero would become a device for the servicing and preservation of Bulero Enterprises; his needs and desires would be met in return. He would be able to help Margot, show her the world, and much more; he would like that, he admitted, hating himself. If his work in physics and the philosophy of science came to nothing, he would have no choice but to try and accomplish something within the company; and if he failed at that, he thought bitterly, the cushion would be there to catch him again, for the last time.

What else could there be for him? He envied the space colonists; they had real work to do. On Asterome they were looking forward to a society that would be free of planets. Somewhere there had to be something for him to give himself to-an enterprise that would combine his love of knowing with flesh-and-blood concerns, with issues and human needs that would put as much love and caring into his life as he felt toward Margot.

His family was pulling him down more strongly than the earth, and he wondered if he could ever break free for long. I've got to get moving. I'm twenty years old and just beginning to wake up. I've got to escape, permanently, into my own kind of world. He looked up at the Bulero Orbital Factory as it passed overhead. Three hundred miles out, with a period of two hours, it was the brightest object in the sky. As he watched its familiar, lazy passage, the sudden feeling came over him that he was too late, that all the forces necessary to crush his hopes were already in motion, advancing toward him out of a distant past, and that he had somehow missed the moment that would have resolved his problems.

He took another deep breath, set his face into a mask, and went inside.

Smoke, billowing, churning gray and black; protean shapes fleeing through the thickening flux; russet masses constrained within a contorted internal space; swelling densities struggling to escape through narrowing fissures in the earth. It was cold in the dream. She struggled to open her eyes....

A glow spread through the cumulus, revealing for a moment the titanic shoulders and limbs of something fighting to be born.

She saw dashes of light-measured electrical activity in the deepest layers of her brain-dreams seen from outside....

She opened her eyes. The sun burned in an abyss, waiting for her to fall in....

A misshapen finger of lightning pierced the ground. The sky darkened and a giant moon cast its indifferent white light through a cancerous opening in the clouds, only to be covered by a black shape gliding toward the dawn, where the sun crouched below the storm, a beast ready to lash out at the world with a scorching tongue.

The rain whispered and fell in a rush of crystalline droplets which still held starlight in their structures. The fissures drank the flood, and dead things floated to the surface. The flapping sound of a large bird came up behind her; sharp talons entered her neck and a ragged beak dipped to drink her blood....

The universe collapsed into a throbbing point inside her head.

A hammer blow struck stone. She cried out....

Pieces of the dream echoed within her as she stood on the stone terrace. The sky was strewn with searingly bright stars, the ones she had come to love as a girl. Here in New Mexico, she had escaped the cotton fog of cities; the clouds had broken to reveal these stars-a universe coming into being, a new immensity for her thoughts; in twenty-five years, she had not tired of its sanctuary.

She reached out across the cathedral of space-time to those hopelessly distant candle-furnaces, where all the material elements had been forged again and again inside the generation of suns, where alien sunspaces were certain to contain other humanities, however different, and she wondered if someone there might be her friend.

The cold air made her shiver, as if in reply, and she turned to go back into the house. The door slid open and she stepped inside.

I'm alone, Janet Bulero thought. She stepped forward and grasped the bulerite railing that circled the pit of the sunken living room, where the aftermath of the party was still alive.

Her only child was a man now. Richard was sitting alone on the sofa in the center of the room. She had watched him grow, become graceful and serious, a quieter version of his father. Sometimes she had worried that his loyalty would go to Jack, but Richard had always been too independent for that to happen; Jack had not tried to win him over, and Richard had not seemed to care.

Behind the huge felt sofa, a slightly drunk Jack Bulero stood with a drink in his left hand. His brother Sam nodded lazily as Jack waved his free hand. Janet recognized the old arguments and self-justifications, wishing that Sam would learn not to be baited into a discussion.

There was still a considerable pride in Jack's six-foot frame, more than he needed or deserved. His tan and his loose-fitting blue suit were hiding overweight and bad posture. His eyes looked up at the ceiling as he spoke, as if he were struggling to look up into his head; his lips tightened and relaxed as he stooped to hear his brother. Janet felt a moment of superiority.

Samuel Bulero's tan reflected a genuine vitality, she told herself, examining him as if he were a stranger. Why had she encouraged this stocky and muscular man, she wondered as she looked at his streaked brown hair and bushy eyebrows. Was it just another way to hang on to Jack?

At her left, halfway around the raised level, Orton Blackfriar sat puffing on a Cuban cigar as he listened to the Beethoven quartet floating out of the high-backed chair's hidden speakers. As she observed his large, familiar shape, the entire mood of coming in from the clear, quiet night was shattered. She looked at Jack. Their formal marriage contract had expired five years before, bringing the informal option into effect; that last link would expire today. As her one-time lawyer, Orton knew the significance of the evening, but had made no comment yet.

For a wild instant this morning, she had dreamed that Jack would send her a confidential record of his declaration as a surprise. She turned from the rail and walked toward Orton.

"I'm thinking of all the work on my desk," he said, shifting as she came near. He's trying to avoid the subject. She sat down on the cushion at his right and listened to the music.

Orton was too good to be governor, she thought. He had not assumed the job from any of the usual motives, but he did it well. He had taken all the wretched cases during his law practice, finding it difficult to blame anyone but the powerful for social problems; as governor he tried to use the public trust of wealth and power to make a difference in individual lives. There were limits to that, he had found.

"You didn't have to do this," Orton said.

She looked up at him. "I'm not really disappointed."

"He did come, after all."

"To reinforce his own view of himself," she said. "To have it reported that he was present at the anniversary celebration of Carlos Bulero's gift to the world."

She had once toyed with the idea of writing down the truth about Jack, especially after she had learned how little could be proved about the Buleros. The documentary broadcast viewed by the guests earlier tonight had been at least one-third fiction. She had found it difficult to remind herself of the truth after the telecast. That's because I'm part of the lie.

It was Carlos Bulero, son of a country doctor from a small village in Ecuador, who had made the family rich through his discovery of bulerite-the family element, she thought, common to us all. Carlos had been a major physicist; his son, Jack, had only dabbled in physics, a businessman taking credit for the work of his employed scientists. It was not known outside the family that Jack had altered his father's records to give himself a large share in the discovery of bulerite and all the credit for the structural applications of the building material. Since all the records were in computer storage, even that much could not be proved, unless Jack produced the written records, but he denied their existence; only Sam had claimed, privately, to know what was in them. Carlos had not cared much for publishing his results.

In recent years, control of the Bulero multinational had begun to slip away from Jack, but he did not seem to care as long as he was not deprived of his wealth, fame, and influence. She looked at Jack's face, noticing the sudden loss of confidence, as if Sam had said something cutting. Gone was the smugness that she had seen at the financial meeting, where she had given her annual report as internal-program auditor. He looked up, noticed her scrutiny, and turned his back as he answered Sam, producing a dead spot in her feelings. To reveal the truth about Jack would make no difference, except as a matter of curiosity; the Bulero stock might dip a point, Jack would issue a denial, and the incident would be forgotten.

There was not much that Jack could do to her; her share of the wealth was safe. No one would object if she chose to do nothing for the rest of her life; with new interests coming into the company, she doubted if she would be missed. She was good at her job, but others were just as good. As Jack was fond of saying, the Buleros had done their bit for the world and should be permitted to live as they pleased.

She had never thought of it in overly dramatic terms, but in a very real sense the skeleton and much of the sinew of the present world had been born in a Bulero brain; that much of the documentary had been true. In the final years of the last century, amid famine and ecocrises, the world had been rebuilt; not perfectly, not completely, but well enough for a new start. The richer nations had divided themselves into ecologically manageable provinces and had built new cities-upward. The open towers, cubes, and pyramids were shelflike latticeworks, into which the remains of the old cities had been moved, preserving the best of the older architectures. She liked to think that there was something of ancient Inca strength in bulerite. Among the superstitious rich, the dream substance had long ago replaced copper and bronze as a material for bracelets and chains.

Every major human settlement in sunspace-on earth, on the moon, Mars, the satellites of Jupiter and Saturn-was built up with the virtually indestructible material, which could be prefabricated into parts of any shape and size, and fitted together permanently on contact.

(Continues...)




Excerpted from MACROLIFE by GEORGE ZEBROWSKI Copyright © 1979 by George Zebrowski. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Contents

I. SUNSPACE 2021,
1. Lives,
2. The Funeral,
3. Undercity,
4. The Shatterer,
5. Doomwatch,
6. A Mobile Utopid,
7. The Cage of Life,
8. The World Swallower,
9. The Minor System,
10. The Struggle,
11. Shares of Glory,
II. MACROLIFE 3000,
12. Transhumanity,
13. Exemplar,
14. Discontent,
15. Wayside World,
16. The City,
17. Relations,
18. Macrogenesis,
19. The Village,
20. Home,
21. The Jump,
22. Earth Again,
23. Cities of the Sun,
24. The Alien,
25. Crossroads,
III. THE DREAM OF TIME,
Chapter i,
Chapter ii,
Chapter iii,
Chapter iv,
Chapter v,
Chapter vi,

Interviews

Explorations Interview with George Zebrowski and Pyr Editorial Director Lou Anders

Paul Goat Allen: Lou, I'll start with you. At a time where most commercial science fiction is, according to Ian Watson, "the intellectual equivalent of fast food," why reissue a deeply meditative and visionary novel like Macrolife?

Lou Anders: One of the central tenets of Macrolife is that planets are dangerous, unpredictable places, and as long as the human race is confined to only one, we are in peril. In addition to the perpetual danger of natural disasters -- ice ages, cometary impacts, supervolcanoes, etc. -- we now have quite a few manmade potential catastrophes on the horizon. The threat of nuclear annihilation seems more credible than it ever was in the days of the 1970s nuclear phobias, when we only had the two superpowers to worry about. And the coming age of environmental collapse, global warming, bioengineering, and emergent A.I. brings its own added dangers. I'm thinking of physicist Dr. Michio Kaku's answer to the Fermi Paradox: [The reason] why alien civilizations haven't contacted us yet is that most of them don't survive to a true spacefaring age. The hurdles of nuclear power, biological weapons, A.I. are just too high, and 99 percent of galactic civilizations wipe themselves out around their equivalent to our current period. At the same, after being stalled out for the past several decades, space exploration seems poised to start up again. In addition to NASA, we have some real interest from private industry, as well as other countries (Europe, Britain, China, even India), the competition from which (and the commercialization of same) could mean the real Space Age is only getting started. In this respect, both the perils and the promise of Macrolife have never seemed more credible.

PGA: George, in the novel's introduction, you stated that American science fiction is dominated by "print television" -- books conceived and written as if they were made-for-TV movies instead of works that challenge the intellect and stimulate the imagination of the reader. I'll ask you a similar question: Is the re-release of Macrolife in 2006 in some ways more timely now than it was back in '79?

George Zebrowski: Yes, even as the survival of our human history grows more unlikely with every year, we count the cost of needed strategic innovations. What is our human life worth? Everything. There is no choice, yet we choose to do too little. Mostly we choose to kill each other, at great expense. In Cave of Stars -- the companion novel to Macrolife -- I depict the degree to which the spacefaring culture fails to escape its planetary past (by the year of the story). A third novel in this originally planned mosaic will carry this problem forward.

PGA: What's so impressive to me concerning this novel is that after almost three decades, Macrolife is just as thought-provoking, mind-bogglingly ambitious, and razor sharp thematically as any new work. Why isn't Macrolife mentioned in the same breath as other mid- to late-'70s masterworks like Frederik Pohl's Gateway, Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama and The Fountains of Paradise, etc.? Was it in some ways a work ahead of its time?

LA: Well, Macrolife is mentioned that way in some circles -- Library Journal picked it as one of the best 100 SF novels ever written, Arthur C. Clarke compared it to Olaf Stapledon, and Isaac Asimov called it George's Foundation series. I think that tales of space migration fell out of favor during the era of the cyberpunk movement; but, ironically, it's the very real children of the cyberpunks -- the dot-com billionaires -- who are bringing it back to relevance once again! It seems that every dot-com billionaire has his own rocket program going these days -- it's almost a status symbol with them -- and it's not hard to image Paul Allen or Jeff Bezos as the head of the Bulero family of George's book. As I've mentioned above, the idea of an artificially constructed global catastrophe is as relevant as ever, whereas for the first time in history, the idea of a privately funded space migration is actually in the realm of possibility as well. In that sense, yes, the novel really was ahead of its time.

PGA: George, how closely was the character of Richard Bulero molded from your own experiences and hopes? For example, lines like "My desire to dream the future at a time when humanity had all but destroyed itself in the solar system" struck me as incredibly autobiographical.

GZ: Let's say that I share this view with both fictional and living people, that spacefaring holds the promise of a new renaissance in our history; but most especially a renaissance in the human character. This new reality would be economic -- more energy and resources, a platform from which to remake the Earth and reduce the levels of greed for wealth, and its first purchase, power over the future. Perhaps we can remake even ourselves.

PGA: Can you describe not only what you felt when you found out that Pyr wanted to reissue the novel but also what kinds of emotions you experienced when you reread the book and wrote the new afterword?

GZ: My afterword says it all, pretty much. Only my reduced vanity these days prevented me from jumping up and down. "One of the few books I intend to read again," Clarke said, but it took me a while to realize what this meant: A sufficiently rich novel can be read again, but you must also have a database of comparison to make the later readings worthwhile. I would not want to read or write a novel that can be exhausted in one reading. You can't ever quite read the same book twice, but a truly simple-minded novel would come close. A book is a mirror, it's been said. If an ass looks into it, you can't expect an apostle to look out.

PGA: This ties in with my earlier questions about the "made-for-TV" mind-set some publishers -- and readers -- seem to have. A lot of younger genre fans have no idea who writers like Olaf Stapledon are; there's no understanding of the glorious history of the genre. If you could reissue any science fiction works and make them available once again to the masses, which ones would they be and why?

GZ: There are too many to list here entirely. Recall that SF's great works begin in the early 1800s and that every decade since then has had at least one notable book, maybe as many as five per decade. I recommend Neil Barron's Anatomy of Wonder series, now in its fifth edition, for a listing by periods. A good book you haven't read may be better than the latest hyped work. Two favorite titles, in my estimation, are James Blish's The Seedling Stars (1957) and his Cities in Flight omnibus, reissued in 2000 by Overlook Press. The greatest feature of SF is its diversity; so many works have vastly differing virtues, to the point that canonic lists of the best are difficult to make. If you, the individual reader, can see the virtues in say, George O. Smith's 1959 novel, The Fourth R, then you'll know what I mean. "Overall" success in a work is an intellectual construction; some logicians will tell you that there are no "generalities," only specific, individual things. Go read H. G. Wells's 1891 essay, "The Rediscovery of the Unique."

Whose fault is it that younger readers are so in the dark? Money is the enemy of merit, as Asimov once said to me. Why would anyone republish great works that made no money, much less "lesser" works with unique virtues? This certainly slows the ability of new readers to explore on their own. They can find used, out-of-print works online or in old bookstores, but numbers are limited and lessening each day. That's why books like Barron's are so important. Still, nothing beats finding the good in something on your own, or thinking about it from scratch, by yourself, once you've read it. Here are a few names to provoke with: besides Wells and Stapledon, the greatest SF writers in the first half of the 20th century are: William Hope Hodgson, S. Fowler Wright, and James Leslie Mitchell. And the most innovative American novel of the same period, not SF but quite fantastic in its own way, is Henry Roth's Call It Sleep.

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