Macrolife

by George Zebrowski

  Much has been made of my Stapledonian influences. For sheer comprehensive vision, his body of work constitutes the single greatest achievement in science fiction’s history. But the last lines of my novel answer Stapledon’s Last and First Men and Star Maker by suggesting a music that will endure, one that does not come and go as in Stapledon’s cosmic novels but contributes to a growing permanence and a net gain, as new macrolife comes into being with each new cycle of nature and becomes aware of macrolife sweeping across from previous cycles. If there is a physical forever to existence, then why not? Freeman Dyson has suggested an all-but-eternal survival of intelligent life through a thrifty, endless ratcheting down of energy use.

  Clearly, Macrolife is a further development of the Utopian novel, unnoticed despite some discussion of this in the novel itself that it is a “dynamic Utopia,” in H. G. Wells’s discussions of the shift away from the “static” models that preceded him. So I have restored the novel’s subtitle, A Mobile Utopia, and urge readers to keep in mind that there have been at least two meanings of the term Utopia since the time of Wells, but too many still recall the static models of earlier writers.

  Macrolife, although it can stand alone, is part of a broader canvas; between its three parts I have also set Cave of Stars, a darker, closer vision that still manages to oppose the darkness, despite the battering of our hopes in recent decades. Two published novelettes, which may yet grow to be parts of novels, deal with the conflict that the mobiles of “macrolife” have with settling nature’s planets.

  I still feel that the central conception is poorly understood, dragged down by weighty pasts, perhaps because it looks critically upon, and rejects, nearly all of science fiction’s past visions about settling other worlds. I see this dialogue going on in my mosaic of stories and novels until the question is resolved—probably by the year 5000 in my fictional chronology. It may never be resolved in reality. The question may never even be tested, but I hope that this is merely shortsightedness. As one endures, we are weighed down by the spectacle of human quarrels, by the blindness of our swarm, by the realization that came to Napoleon that there was little he could do against privileged wealth and power, and maybe even less by the cat’s cradles of familial knots.

  Someone once said that there are no Utopias that he would want to live in. I have always wanted to live in the macrolife culture and to continue learning throughout an indefinite life span, in epochs that would have their own emerging problems—but not those of the past. A room with heat, electric light, a television, and a library, not to mention online access to a library, would have been a Utopian vision to Thomas Jefferson.

  I now say, against a creeping darkness of doubt, that something like macrolife has to be the ultimate in social systems and in the survival of intelligent life, human life included. But even in the near term, across the next millennium, our failure to become a space-faring world may well be suicidal when we consider what we can do for our world from the high ground of the solar system: energy and resources, planetary management, and most important the ability to prevent the world-ending catastrophe of an asteroid strike. This last threat will happen; it is not a question of if but when. Today we are utterly helpless before such a danger and would know of it only when it was already happening.

  But the deepest threat to our survival lives inside all of us. The powers of the Earth today took power from previous powers, with cultures overlaying previous ones by force, and the latest always fear innovation unless they control it, since innovation would rearrange the rule of the planet. The struggle over energy resources may yet plunge us into a new dark age, if not extinction, by our own hands. We have not gone out into the solar system, or raised up our poor and powerless, because that would also change too much for our existing powers, who do fear that more for the many means less for the few. Virgil wrote of the Romans, “To these I set no bounds in time or space/They shall rule forever,” but today we are learning to reject a planetary minority as the Earth’s master—and that is what the traditional masters fear most, that the future will not belong to their generations, to the devils they know within themselves. When confronted with the concept of space colonies in the second half of the twentieth century, politicians muttered, “Uh, we can’t have that. It would change too much. And it’s too expensive.” Public interest waned by the mid-1980s, much as it had turned against space exploration in the early 1950s, until the political disaster of Sputnik in 1957 revived the idea, and I began to wonder what kind of planetary disaster would kick our world out of its cradle into genuine space-faring and world-building. The view of the Earth from the Moon gave us a sense of our world’s fragility. It is in fact a space colony, a skylife conglomeration of materials held together by gravity, and far from safe.

  The test of a Utopia is its treatment of the individual. A dynamic Utopia, one that responds to the external universe and to the inner life of its people, must safeguard both itself and the individual, with legal, fully usable safeguards for both. Olaf Stapledon held that a society must deserve its individuals and its individuals must deserve their society. That is the solution to the problem of the individual in society; it calls for responsibilities from both, so the solution is both profoundly conservative and radical at the same time, hinging on the and of that sentence being practiced. The economic social container has to be inviolate, since it supports all that is possible without determining its content; but the true test would come in its tolerance of dissident and departing individuals, something the Soviet Union and many other governments have not been able to tolerate consistently. “The State is for Individuals,” Wells wrote in A Modern Utopia. “The law is for freedoms, the world is for experiment, experience, and change; these are the fundamental beliefs upon which a modern Utopia must go.” These great words sound the very theme of science fiction as an exploratory fiction, as a freedom of inner exploration and self-programming that our world has hit upon to help it see ahead. Fictional and imaginative, but aspiring to reality. The words of a novel, however, cannot guarantee any future reality’s success; therefore, one cannot make of macrolife a failure unless we go out and try it out.

  Utopian ideas, whether of the static or dynamic kind, are usually confronted, often with derision, with the evidence of human nature, which, it is claimed, requires conflict inherited from the evolutionary mill. Few critics of Utopias care to admit that we can in fact see beyond the dramatic imperfections of our given physiology, that we can to a large degree question our biological constraints, that these do not completely block our imaginative efforts to step back from our humanity and see possibilities in freer, economically liberated measures of man.

  Great fear is made of the lockstep of impoverished Utopias not worthy of the name; that is why this has been a term of derision. Yet Utopias remain as the great empty space on our maps, reproaches to our acceptance of who we have been given to be by nature. They have threatened and beckoned with creative possibilities and shame the easy way with which so many of us have turned away from the effort. What we are has its own inertia and a self-serving way of rationalizing what should be questioned and perhaps even despised by a creative, adventurous spirit that has acquired enough plasticity and free will to make of itself its own project for the future. Our literatures, fictions all, have been a way of “distancing” ourselves from ourselves, of seeing, as the historian Giambattista Vico saw, that much of what we ascribe to human nature is more circumstance and culture than nature, much of it made by ourselves, and that what we have made in one way we might make in another. Vico was generous with his vision of human freedom, but despite the catastrophe of the twentieth century, our creative freedom to remake ourselves through a growing knowledge does in fact await us, even if we can take only small steps; but if we believe that we are ruled by unreachable inner forces that will only subvert all the promise of our science and technology, that the complexities of our short lives transcend our ability to understand and deal with them, then we are indeed lost. We do ha
ve the choice to reject this view, even if it may be true, and bring the battle to a test that will defeat the past and grow a new freedom.

  “The Ultimate Human Society,” as Dandridge Cole presented the idea, is perhaps misleading, since the concept of macrolife is one thing only in its economic and technological sense, but an endless series of opportunities for cultural ways to grow on the basic life-support model. What more could intelligent life ask for? All of our planetary societies have tended toward it, in every form of community from village to city. Dandridge Cole had it right, but his visionary successors, from Gerard K. O’Neill to many a science fiction writer, did not consider the idea’s full implications. It is not all engineering, hardware, and “big dumb objects,” but a waiting opportunity for a better human life. It has been my privilege to write novels searching out the human implications, as well as the implications for intelligent life, in the arena of the novel, which has traditionally been a central and complex court of human inquiry, and where so much of today’s literature, in the words of Fred Hoyle, is myopic and shortsighted before the “golden chances” that wait for us and which we may lose. No planetary future for intelligent life is assured except through knowledge and action.

  So I welcome this new edition of my early hopes, now darker, to confront my doubts. And I welcome the fact that this new edition comes from a publisher who has long stood for Enlightenment values, which for me have always lived at the heart of science fiction’s loftier but too often commerce-crippled life. The best of science fiction has increased human awareness of the future tense for some two centuries now, but we must remind ourselves how new such an impulse is, as it struggles to grow in the human mind, which is still hobbled by our inheritance from a survivalist nature.

  All literature, at whatever scale of observation, has been a stepback seeing effort; and we must take it as a sign of hope that we have anything like this ability, not only to look back but to gaze forward, and not just to see what is merely possible but even to make new things happen.

  George Zebrowski

  Delmar, New York

  June 2005

  About the Author

  George Zebrowski’s forty books include novels, short-fiction collections, anthologies, and a book of essays. His works have appeared in all the science fiction magazines, as well as in Omni, Nature, Popular Computing, and the Bertrand Russell Society News.

  Arthur C. Clarke described Macrolife as “a worthy successor to Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker. It’s been years since I was so impressed. One of the few books I intend to read again.” Library Journal listed Macrolife as one of the one hundred best science fiction novels, and the Easton Press published it in its Masterpieces of Science Fiction series. Cave of Stars, a recent novel, also belongs to the Macrolife mosaic. Zebrowski’s works have been translated into eight languages; his short fiction has been nominated for the Nebula Award and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. Brute Orbits, an uncompromising novel about a future penal system, was honored with the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Novel of the Year in 1999.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1979 by George Zebrowski

  978-1-4976-3417-6

  This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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