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Macroscope (SF) - Piers Anthony ***

Having recently re-read a classic in Neuromancer, a friend asked if I'd come across Macroscope (which I hadn't). Dating back to 1969, it's very much a period piece. It reinforces my view of Piers Anthony as capable of coming up with interesting and different ideas but not being a great writer in terms of style.

The macroscope in question is a kind of super-telescope that instead of using photons makes use of macrons (as opposed to macarons) - which travel at the speed of light but don't follow an inverse power law, making it possible to observe in detail what happens at any location in the galaxy. But it can also act as a kind of super-educator with a catch.

Central characters initially are two mid-twenties individuals: Brad who is super-intelligent and Ivo who is super-intuitive. They have a mysterious past which is only hinted at - Brad brings in Ivo to try to deal with the aforementioned catch that the macroscope wrecks the brains of intelligent people when trying to obtain information from alien races. (Soon after, Brad becomes less of a central character and three others are added to the mix, but I can't say why without spoilers.)

Our heroes head out to Neptune to avoid the UN (surely there are easier ways to do this), but escaping requires surviving 10 g for a long period - the solution for this is weird in the extreme (not to mention unsavoury in its description), though it does allow for the sort of discussion the crew of the Enterprise really should have had about using the transporter. (Apparently it does come up in James Blish's Star Trek novel Spock Must Die.) Along the way we get plenty of obsession with IQ and racial identity.

From here on in things get more and more extreme and when the crew arrive at the location of one of the sources of the signal that wrecks brains, we find astrology worryingly taking on a major role along with odd excursions into something between dreams and the ability to move to different times and places. Frankly, the last part is a bit of a mess.

The date the book is set in is initially somewhat confusing. Ivo was born in 1955 and is around 25 - and later evidence suggests the setting is 1980. This is reinforced by them using Saturn VI rockets (presumably imagined as the follow up to the Apollo Saturn Vs). Yet it's hard to imagine anyone in 1969 really imagined the developments in space travel featured here would be possible by that year - and more confusingly, Ivo sometimes appears to remember events before 1955, though this is presumably an early dip into those experiences between dreams and time travel.

This is makes the book a fascinating relic of the period, if not always very readable. Anthony throws in the kitchen sink and reveals what's happening sufficiently slowly that it can be frustrating to read, not helped by his limited abilities as a writer. And I really find it difficult to forgive the inclusion of astrology as a science. But Macroscope is definitely worth a place as a significant book in SF history, even if it's read more as a curiosity than an enjoyable experience.

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