Book Review: Macroscope

Remember back in school when you had to give speeches in front of the class? There'd be times when you'd get a good topic and could come up with a speech you were proud of, or at least not ashamed of. Then, when you think you're almost done writing the damn thing you found you just couldn't write a conclusion that didn't make you sound like a complete moron. You'd said all you wanted to and really just wanted to let it end there. But to anyone watching it'd be like you stopped talking mid-thought. If you couldn't work it out you'd say "...uh, and that's my speech about potato farming in the heart of Africa."

That's kind of how I felt about "Macroscope" by Piers Anthony. The book has a weak ending, but most of the rest I quite liked.

In the not too terribly distant future, a satellite orbits the Earth with a special kind of telescope. It can see just about anywhere in the Milky Way galaxy. It can watch a TV on planets thousands of light years away, read a note sealed in an envelope and shoved inside a safe, or explore inside the planet's crust for mineral deposits. And as awesome and dangerous as a telescope like that might be that's just the beginning of what it can do. Humans weren't the first species to develop it. All across the galaxy other species have been using their versions of the same thing for many hundreds of thousands of years. Not just to peer at other planets, but to broadcast signals of their own. Some signals were for entertainment purposes, but a lot of them were educational. How to manipulate gravity. How to move organic matter at high acceleration. How to terraform planets. Coming from hundreds of different planets and civilizations.

At some point some race decided, for reasons that become clear, to cripple the transmissions. Make it so anyone of sufficient intelligence to view and understand the signals would have their minds destroyed.

And that's where our story begins. The research team can use the macroscope as a telescope, but anyone who has used it to view the signal has had their brains turned to mush. One of the project leaders brings in a guy he used to know. They were both in a program that took children and tried to make geniuses of them. The new guy is the only person who knows how to find the program's greatest success. A person whose brains would allow him to work around the mind destroying signal.

But before they could accomplish anything an influential politician comes to the station and insists he see the signal. It killed him. Now the UN is coming to claim the macroscope is a weapon and that the scientists have been spying on people and nations on Earth. They'll loudly and publicly destroy it before quietly and privately putting it back together for their own use.

Now our heroes have to take the macroscope and a rocket and flee the Earth. Using the one person who can safely use the macroscope they have to use it to ensure their safety, find the source of the signal, and shut it down if they can.

The end of the book has this battle of wits between a brilliant but immature mind, a more mature but only moderately intelligent mind. They must duel in rooms based on the zodiac.

The book is rather long. It has some ideas I haven't seen in stories before and rather intrigued me. I'd like to see this book rewritten. Maybe with a more satisfactory ending.