Book review: Macroscope

SciFi trash by Piers Anthony. I read his OX etc, which I now discover to be 0X etc, many years ago, though I remember little of it except the game-of-life, which helped me fill in several dull hours during my history O-level when I'd run out of history to regurgitate, my memory being poor. Aanyway, I knew the kind of stuff I was getting into and lo and behold, the characters are cardboard as is the geopolitical situation. For unclear reasons he appears to try to rescue astrology, but it a long book and he has lots of things to throw in, some of which I skipped over.

The main "sci" element is the macrons, not to be mistaken for a Gallic leader, no, these are some kind of particles rather like light, in that they travel at the speed of light and allow one to form visual representations; indeed in most repsects they are exactly like light, except they can be "focussed" to arbitrary distance and through solid bodies. Anmd they can also be rx'd (well, obvs) and hence tx'd by aliens as it turns out, thus allowing the cognoscenti access to alien tech, because this is, helpfully, being broadcast.

It turns out - stop me if I've got this wrong, it was all so utterly implausible that I skipped lots of the exposition, plus the expo was done via his characters, who were irritating - that the helpful tech signals are being masked by a "destroyer" signal (which fries your brain), which is itself there to stop people rx'ing the "traveller" signal (which latter somehow allows interstellar flight). After a while they start thinking that the "destroyer" might not be so bad, because the "traveller", by allowing interstellar flight, permits war, and there's some mind-bogglingly crude caricatures of how-to-fight-wars that shows you that war is bad, in case you didn't know. But! Then it turns out that suppressing initiative tends to dullness, so perhaps overall the wars are worth it. So, there's some attempt at "philosophy" in there, and the answer, per Garden of Eden, is that refusing to look at the truth is bad, so at least he gets the right answer, well done.