This first work set in the macroworld covers a huge time and distance, though in a few sections and with massive elisions. In part one a catastrophic technological collapse on earth in the near future, when a few asteroids have been hollowed for colonisation, leads to "Asterome" turning itself into a spacecraft heading outwards from the sun; the disproportionately large second part describes the life of one man a thousand years hence; and in the short final section, an observer discusses the end of the universe before the big bang resets everything.

This is also a family saga, as the novel follows the members or clones of the Bulero family. The founder has made Bulerite the basis of all earthly development, allowing massive building on the earth; unfortunately, Bulerite proves inherently unstable, releasing huge amounts of energy when it cracks. Fortunately, it has hardly been used on the satellite arcologies, and the Bulero family are among the lucky few who escape from the earth and then from sunspace. The protagonist of the second section is a Bulero clone, and so is the observer of the third.

By the time John Bulero goes exploring in 3000 CE worlds have been explored, settled, abandoned; even worse, whole societies have been abandoned. Bulero returns to an older girlfriend on Asterome with few signs of changing his personal morality after one excursion planet-side leaves his woman and her family dead. He continues to explore space, though, even while he continues to explore what it means to be a Bulero. Being human does not mean being a missionary helping redeem the de-evolved Crusoes in the planets of the macroworld.

Zebrowski's work has been criticised for his lack of plot, and MACROLIFE shows this weakness. It also means that the novel becomes a tract in which unthinking expansion is taken as a norm, even while there is almost no movement in inner space, that is, in individuals considering themselves. Those two oppositions would create tension even if they did not constitute "plot", but they are missing. The other unspoken element in the book is the unquestioning acceptance of destiny in the cloned family line. It seems an unhealthy acceptance of "nature" that in every Bulero clone the rightness of Bulerotude should emerge. One would think that in a thousand years, perhaps just once or twice, "nurture" would bring up a clone who showed a divergence from a near-divine right to rule and be. Zebrowski may have been the first but he was not the last to include this sort of logic - it re-appeared as recently as 2002 in John C. Wright's THE GOLDEN AGE: A Romance of the Far Future. There seems to be some innate correlation between the distances of hard sf and the necessity for a family line even if cloned.

Inside, the text is prefixed and divided by pages of quotations from extropians such as Gerard K. O'Neill, Carl Sagan and Dandridge Cole (who coined the term "macro-life"); comes with both the original and a new author's conclusion; and has an enthusiastic introduction from Ian Watson. Finding Watson's enthusiasm at odds with the inhuman-ness (if not inhumanity) of MACROLIFE I went looking for Zebrowski's own opinions and found interesting interviews with him on the Infinity-Plus and Wigglefish web sites. He cites Fred Hoyle: 'a superior human type would not be unrecognizable to us today. The concept of a "gentleman" is one such notion', and elsewhere Zebrowski says 'as long as we remain unchanged human beings, as we have been for much longer than recorded history, then every danger imaginable hangs over us, including destruction by our own hand'. Surely, then, cloning is the first thing to abandon if we are to create those superior, greater, macro-lives? Perhaps Zebrowski will set you, like me, on a wider search to answer that question.