Macrolife (37 page)

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The physical concept of macrolife as a “societal container” is not the work of one person. Dandridge Cole originated the term “Macro Life,” and described it in “The Ultimate Human Society” (1961). Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and J. D. Bernal had much earlier suggested this kind of space-colony concept, stressing the use of sunspace as an energy-rich environment for civilization. Artificial planets appeared in the works of Olaf Stapledon and others. The idea of self-contained space habitats as alternatives to natural worlds is also related to the “generation starship” idea, a kind of Noah's Ark for colonizing the stars.

I started with Cole's hollow asteroid and projected its development beyond this stage. I used an asteroid because it might be safer, providing shielding from solar radiation as well as natural resources. Gerard O'Neill's space cylinder, as well as other designs which assume construction from scratch, seem too precarious to me right now, but I may be wrong. O'Neill's approach to the space-habitat idea, however, strikes me as a thoroughly considered near-future vision. I suspect that space habitats will get built in just about every way they can be built.

I was also stimulated by Isaac Asimov's neglected version of long-term space-habitat development (“There's no Place Like Spome,” 1965, reprinted in
Is Anyone There
? Doubleday, 1967), as well as by G. Harry Stine's
The Third Industrial Revolution
(Putnam, 1975). Mr. Stine bears some responsibility for this novel's existence, because in 1961 he complained (in “Science Fiction Is Too Conservative,”
Analog
) that concepts such as Cole's Macro Life were being ignored by science fiction authors and that most of the innovative speculation was going on outside SF. This is even more true today, I'm sorry to report. If he had mentioned Asimov's spomes, I wonder if the title on the cover of this novel might have been
Spomelife
?

The richness of the macrolife concept lies not only in its physical aspects, but in the psychosocial consequences for the idea of human society, in the ways that human experience might be affected and transformed into something else; this speculative richness is the province of the novelist. I am certain that I have not exhausted macro-life within the pages of one book.

I would like to thank those people who were directly helpful in the writing of this novel: Poul Anderson, Gregory Benford, Mark Olson, Pamela Sargent, Marjorie Horvitz (finest of copy editors), M. S. Wyeth Jr., and Stephen K. Roos (thoughtful, demanding editors both), Norbert Slepyan, Joseph Elder, William Pizante, Robert Neidorf, Robert L. Forward, Jack Dann; for their encouragement, Guy Streatfeild, John and Magda McHale.

Paolo Soleri's concept of “arcologies” (among them a spacegoing version) was partially responsible for my naming the first macroworld Asterome. Special thanks to “Rebus Heviwait” and “Emmanuel Lighthanger,” whose enterprising book,
Projex
(Links Books, 1972), was invaluable. John McHale's classic
The Future of the Future
(Braziller, 1969) was also very helpful.

Of course, the people mentioned above had nothing to do with the changes I may have made in their speculations. All mistakes and misconceptions are mine.

What can an author say about a novel he wrote in a bold mood of declamatory poetry over twenty-five years ago, a first novel that he dreamed about throughout his high school years and which finally came to him in handsome publication? Well, one can observe and measure the past, and be gratified that this novel received high praise from its many readers and continues to do so. At the end of his days, Isaac Asimov said to me, “These stories about macrolife will be your Foundation series. Don't neglect them!”

I was writing this book from about 1961 onward, struck by the social ideas of mobile habitats in the scientific/engineering work of Dandridge Cole and developing his vision not only in its engineering aspect but also in the philosophical view of mobile habitats as the ultimately flexible societal organism, capable of great divergent development. No work of fiction had taken the ideas as far as I did by 1979; one had to look to the nonfiction of J. D. Bernal, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, and Isaac Asimov, to various suggestions in the works of Olaf Stapledon, and to Cole's brief works, not to stories and novels. But one thing was clear to me even as a teenager: I took the idea as a reality waiting to be realized.

The writing of my novel, which presents three visionary snapshots in the life of mobile habitats and what they are
for
, swallowed my life for most of two decades. As Dante had been inspired by theological cosmologies to search out a context for human life, I was drawn to the deeper implications of space travel and to a critical reconsideration of a too easily accepted idea of settling the planets of other solar spaces.
Macrolife
also sang to me as a symphonic structure—a heroic first part, a slower middle movement, and a long visionary poem for the finale.

One criticism raised about the novel when it was first published claimed that it did not show “how we get from here to there.” It was basically a dismissal of the Utopian visionary ideals of the story, somehow forgetting that all of Part 1 presents catastrophe as the midwife of change, if not progress, as it has always been throughout human history, if one reads and remembers that the fall of every major civilization sows the seeds of the next. I would prefer that planetary disaster not be the midwife to the birth of macrolife; but it may in fact have to be so, whether it be ecological of our own making, cosmic (permitted by our own inaction), or sociopolitical. My contribution was in suggesting that a mobile civilization would not fail, at least not as easily as our planetary cultures have fallen, and perhaps not ever.

Ever
is a cosmological word deeply rooted in our apprehensions about reality, because we still come and go too quickly. I was thinking of Robert A. Heinlein's Future History Chart, from which I fondly recall the entry for 2600 AD—“Civil Disorder, followed by the end of human adolescence, and the beginning of first mature culture.” I also charted a future history, for use in writing the novel, on a white board in black marker; one day I will revise it.

Another notable misconception involved the scale of my mobiles. One reviewer asked why they were called macroworlds, since they were so “small,” little realizing that length is not the same as volume and square surface area, which can yield an inner surface at least twice that of the Earth, as noted at the start of Part 2. One curiously derisive comment likened this novel to a famously difficult philosophical work, when in fact my novel's reading level has been measured as being that of midcollege. William Styron once said that a good novel should leave the reader slightly exhausted, and I say that a science fiction novel without actual thinking in it is not worthy of the name.

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 have 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.