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3.39 AVERAGE
3.39 AVERAGE
is it 5 star quality? maybe, maybe not. it was the book that reminded me how much i love reading and writing, and for that it changed my life. (cheesy)
Loose and rambling with annoying stereotypical characters that made me think it was written in the 1950s when women were only either good wives or good-for-now. It also struggles with identity, starting in pseudo noir then fumbling ineptly into the fantastic, finally coming out crudely and unsatisfyingly scrambled.
If this had been the first book by Piers Anthony I had read, I would never pick up another of his books. I love science-fiction. Love fantasy, the absurd, the fantastic. Macroscope belongs in the genre of awful, in the museum of fossilized relics we dust off on occasion to see from whence we came and relish how far we've come.
If this had been the first book by Piers Anthony I had read, I would never pick up another of his books. I love science-fiction. Love fantasy, the absurd, the fantastic. Macroscope belongs in the genre of awful, in the museum of fossilized relics we dust off on occasion to see from whence we came and relish how far we've come.
Thankfully less weirdly perverted than other Anthony novels, this one held my interest at the beginning and the end, it was just the middle that was a bit of a slog. I feel like it suffered from too many ideas, in the end, and there wasn't enough time to really tie them all together, but as far as early 70s SF goes it was pretty good, and the fact that it was racism and violence that was holding back the human race (as well as many other galactic civilizations) was a nice touch for 1969-70. It was nominated for a Hugo but of course stood no chance of winning, given it was up against both Vonnegut and LeGuin at their absolute best.
I remember reading this as a high schooler and thinking that it was some of the most difficult reading I'd attempted up to that point. After this epic novel, I returned to lighter fare.
A lot of...things happen in Macroscope. I didn't like all of them. Hell, I didn't even understand all of them. This book isn't of my usual style, but I enjoyed most of it. If I try to say anything else about it, I'm going to end up writing a review almost as long as the book, so I'll end here. People who know me and want to hear more know where to find me.
Re-reading this book after 30 years didn't improve it much. I could only remember one thing from my first reading: a detailed description of how the characters melted into glup to withstand 10G acceleration in a space vehicle, and the reconstitution process beginning with a tadpole like creature swimming around in the glup and swallowing it until the person was restored. But the rest remains forgettable. Even for science fiction, this was simply beyond belief.
This is a novel of really big ideas and creative flourishes ... but did I enjoy it? No. Here's the problem: for the first half of this long novel, the characters do little more than talk. For the second half, stuff happens but the plot is all over the place. This is stream of consciousness plotting, and it gets seriously irritating. I loved the vastness of the concepts but I hated the clumsy presentation. It's a painful example of an author who has great ideas but lacks the technical skills to present them in an engaging manner. Messy.
I started reading this primarily for research purposes: something to do with language that destroyed language, like a snow crash. However, I was pleased with this entry in classic scifi, and thought it far superior to Anthony's other work (incarnations of immortality series). However I had trouble getting by the main character's (intentionally) dull presence, and his slightly overcooked sexist views of another main character. Thankfully this archaic attitude declines as the plot chugs along towards an exciting conclusion. I liked Anthony's juggling of both hard science and astrology, and the fair depictions of alien cultures as well as transcendent species. While there was enough material to stretch over several books, I'm thankful for the readerly ease that helped me finish it under a week. In all, Anthony is a better writer than his contemporaries (Asimov or Clarke) but the slightly disjointed structure of the book prevents it from attaining true classic status of the aforementioned contemporaries' best work.