Macrolife Read Online Free

knocks over the conversation. The point is that our irrational heritage from the evolutionary jungle of rape and murder—“nature’s agriculture of death”—must be opposed by rational intelligence if we are to survive and transcend ourselves. The style of Macrolife reflects its firm adherence to reason and to the power of rational persuasion.
    It isn’t the case that it would be vulgar to have the characters joking, swearing, and “slanging” each other. Rather, the mood of the dialogue is the mood of the book’s deepest beliefs, beliefs that are sincerely held rather than merely being adopted as a pretext to write a momentarily vivid but forgettable yarn.
    Much trivia occurs in novels, a lot of it concerned with so-called character-building. Zebrowski’s characters aren’t flat; they are complex and imperfect, especially John Bulero in Part 2, no superhero but a study in failure who manages in the end to transcend his somewhat self-indulgent angst. Yet trivia as such are absent. Perhaps this reflects Zebrowski’s relations as a child with his own parents. The Nazi war, and the sufferings of his parents and his people, “cast its shadow over everything,” he confesses, “preventing my problems from just being my own. I had no right to have lesser problems.” Personal trivia were as nothing.
    In Part 2, “Macrolife: 3000,” the cloned John Bulero is an old-style human being among a space-faring community of genetically enhanced specimens of humanity-plus—who link with the presiding artificial intelligence and are now part way toward the larger mind-fusion to come. John’s compulsive, if shy, adventuring upon the dirt-world Lea, which becomes increasingly bound up with his own erotic mesmerism by the planet-born young woman Anulka, comes to grief finally through failure of forethought on his part followed by a failure of rationality. Being ruled by the old drives—such as plain savage revenge and the habit of pulling the wool over one’s eyes—John may seem in some respects a more “real” character than others who are genetically akin to him in the “Sunspace: 2021” section. Yet he is, in fact, exactly as they were. It is only by comparison with the transhu-mans now surrounding him that he seems more familiar to us . This is actually an illusion, a product of our mesmerism by the old emotional drives and of our consequent expectations as to how “real” characters ought to behave, namely, to fly into rages, to sulk, to fight, to agonize, to act irrationally. Just as the personal must eventually be superseded and integrated, so “personalities” should not be valued too grossly.
    At the same time, John’s errors—and the errors represented by the dirtworld—forcefully illustrate an important fact about evolution in any species, namely, that individuals and species alike must not aspire to a wholly perfect state where they can no longer make errors from which to learn.
    Macrolife first appeared in 1979. Just over a decade earlier another believer in the transmutation of humanity, Alexei Panshin, won a
    Nebula Award for his novel Rite of Passage , detailing the twenty-seven-thousand-strong society of another macroworld, an asteroid starship commuting around the dirtworlds that were seeded before nuclear cataclysm destroyed the Earth due to overpressure in the egg. Zebrowski’s “factual” sources for Macrolife were such as J. D. Bernal and Dandridge Cole, but it’s illuminating to examine the fictional evolution of the idea between Rite of Passage and the later book.
    Panshin’s society, like that of Zebrowski’s original Asterome, is a two-tiered democracy with an executive council and the option of universal plebiscites. However, Panshin’s macroworlders are quite rigidly conservative and opposed to change, and a power ethic prevails. In Macrolife , when the UN