Skip to main content

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.

Paperback:   

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
These articles will always be free - but if you'd like to support my online work, consider buying a virtual coffee or taking out a membership:
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Beyond Belief - Helen Pearson *****

Apparently it comes as a surprise to many that medicine was not particularly scientific until the end of the twentieth century (to be honest, it's no surprise to me - we had a GP who used homeopathy in the 90s). Instead it was based on anecdotal guidance - the kind of thing that appeared to work. Evidence-based medicine has since improved the field, trying where possible to base decisions on evidence, ideally based on randomised controlled trials. The first part of Helen Pearson's book covers this well - though I think it's by far the least interesting part of what we discover. Instead what's truly fascinating is the rest of it, looking at a wide range of other fields where evidence was rarely properly used and that are only now starting to dip a toe in the water. These include social policy, policing, conservation, business and education. The main part of the book gives us examples of how bad these areas have been in terms of basing decisions on what's always been ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Infinite Book – John D. Barrow ****

Authors are often asked to review books on a topic they’ve written on themselves. The reasoning is sensible – they ought to know something about the subject – but there’s always that uneasy suspicion that there’s going to be a bit of bias creeping in. So I think it’s only fair to admit up front that I have written a book on infinity (of which more later). Infinity is a wonderful subject, because it’s intimately mind-bending (if the combination sounds paradoxical, that’s what infinity is all about) and gives you the chance to pull in all sorts of different concepts and assocations along the way, something Barrow does with great gusto. There’s a surprisingly large amount of coverage here for God, and for the universe, and the book jumps around from Aristotle to Hilbert’s Infinite Hotel (explained at great length), from the paradoxes of infinite sets to the paradoxes of time travel. Overall it’s an enjoyable journey that gives plenty of opportunity to be amazed and surprised. The...
Post a Comment
Read more

Adventures of a Computational Explorer - Stephen Wolfram ***

Stephen Wolfram, the man behind the scientist's mathematical tool of choice, Mathematica, plus a whole host of other software products, including the uncanny Wolfram Alpha knowledge engine, is undoubtedly a genius of the first order. In this book, we get an uncensored excursion into the mind of genius - which is, without doubt, a fascinating prospect. The book consists of a collection of essays and speeches that Wolfram has produced over the last ten to fifteen years, covering an eclectic range of topics. Like all such collections, the result is something that lacks the coherence of a book with a narrative that runs through it, inevitably introducing a degree of repetition and a mix of interesting and not-so-interesting topics - but there's likely to be something to catch the attention anyone who is into computing or mathematics. One of the most interesting pieces is the opening one, where Wolfram describes being a consultant on the SF movie Arrival. He seems to hav...
Post a Comment
Read more