I am generally the first audience for my blog posts (my wife is my second) but I don’t know that I’ve ever written a blog post that is more for and about myself. It’s about a book that wasn’t a huge hit, that I only remember because I forgot so much of it. It’s a strange thing to write about, and yet I feel compelled.

Heavy spoilers throughout for a book you probably never have or will encounter (though you can buy a weird edition of it now if you’d like).

The lost book

I grew up in a small town, and not far from my house was my favorite place: the public library. It wasn’t just any library, it was an original Carnegie library — built before 1920, and expanded on in the 80s.

The expansion included a basement where the kids section was, and what at the time felt like a huge non-fiction section, but the front of the library, in the original building, is where the adult fiction lived. As soon as I could I started going to that section, trying to find books that would interest me.

I think I was more interested in the wing back chairs next to a skylight where you could sit and read and listen to the rain for hours than in the actual adult fiction books. And I loved the idea of all the books that had passed through that specific part of the library.

At some point I checked out a book that stuck with me, but I couldn’t remember the name. I remembered there was a spherical space ship, that the cover showed a bunch of people looking up at it, that there was something about parallel universes and that there was a romance where one of the partners died or something and then the other encountered a parallel version of her in the future.

I could remember all that, but I couldn’t remember the title or the author! For whatever reason this book stuck in my mind. I would randomly google search pieces of the plot I remembered, or do image searches for the cover, all to no avail.

When ChatGPT and the like became popular one of the first things I did was describe the book. It couldn’t help me. Eventually that became my go-to test of new models — help me find this book!

When they released the most recent version of Claude I gave it another try, with no luck. However, it did link to a stack exchange question that it said talked about a book that definitely wasn’t the book I was looking for (I was going through all the links it turned up). Guess what? It WAS the book I was looking for! Thanks, sort of, Claude!

(that could be the marketing slogan for AI at this point)

Stranger Suns

The book is called Stranger Suns. The cover (well, a cover, not the cover of the one I eventually got) did indeed sort of resemble my memory:

I remembered more earth tones, and the people being smaller and on the right, and the ship being more solid, but I think that’s because in the book there’s one ship in Antarctica and one in Brasil and my brain took the Antarctica based cover and made it Brazilian, for some reason.

Let me summarize the plot for you. It gets wild.

Juan is a physicist working on a tachyon detector he helped design in orbit around a near-future earth that is slowly dying due to climate change. As they’re spinning up the detector he finds a signal coming from somewhere he didn’t expect — EARTH! DUN DUN DUUUUNNN.

Antarctica, to be precise. So he goes down with some pals from the UN and they dig up what turns out to be an ancient ship, clearly not of human manufacture. When they find the door, four scientists go aboard and then the ship takes off. We find out that the ship responds to thought based commands, but because humans are primitive we can’t really access it, so it goes into default mode and starts jetting around the galaxy/universe. Within some suns (accessed by dropping into a sort of “subspace” where the ships aren’t burned up) are refueling bases for the ship, so it “jumps” faster than light between these suns, looking for something, until it finally stops at a planet.

Some intrigue happens on the planet (and one of their team members die) and eventually the team discovers “frames” — doorways on the ships that are completely black. When they step through the frame they find it is a transporter of some kind that can take you instantaneously to a paired frame anywhere in the universe, and using these they eventually find their way back to another ship on Earth (the aforementioned Brazilian ship).

They dig out of the buried ship, flag down a passing car on the freeway, and make their way back to the UN. The guy who has arranged all this says he’s sending someone to debrief them and imagine their surprise when the guy sent to debrief them is the same guy they just buried out in space!!

DUN DUN DUUUUUUNNNNN.

Eventually they discover that these frames not only displace you in space/time, but also between parallel universes. Every time you step through one, you’re entering a different universe. The more times you use it, the further the probabilities drift from your “original” universe. On this Earth their team member was sick when they all entered the ship, so he stayed behind and survived. He’s very similar to their friend, but not exactly the same.

They’re sent out to rescue another team that was trapped on a different ship, only to come back to an earth ruined by nuclear war. So they try again and again — hundreds of times, trying to find an Earth that didn’t end up killing itself. But humanity appeared to be very stubborn in their self-destructive tendencies.

This is a major theme of the book, and one that I think led to some of the bad reviews. Essentially, humanity always screws up. And when we create new technology, we almost always use it to kill other humans. So if we were given unfathomably powerful technology, what would we do with it? Apparently, according to the main characters internal monologue, potentially unfathomable evil.

Or, as the great Aesop Rock puts it:

Wait, it gets awful: you could split an atom willy-nilly
If it’s energy that can be used for killing, then it will be
It’s not about a better knife, it’s chemistry and genocide
And medicine for tempering the heck in a projector light
Landmines, Agent Orange, leaded gas, cigarettes
Cameras in your favorite corners, plastic in the wilderness
We cannot be trusted with the stuff that we come up with
The machinery could eat us, we just really love our buttons, um

Juan’s doubt in humanity is mostly proven correct. In one of the universes he finds himself in, they have unearthed the Brazilian ship and are using the frames to send criminals to an abandoned planet. The planet has “replicators” which will endlessly create copies of whatever is inside them, providing them with food and clothing, but with their basic needs taken care of, the inmates of this prison planet have nothing to fill their time. They are adrift in a sea of apathy, losing the will to survive and rousing themselves only for occasional bouts of senseless violence.

(I cannot believe Zebrowski made it through these chapters without mentioning Australia a SINGLE TIME)

This negativity is what leads to some of the poor reviews on Amazon, but what’s interesting is that Zebrowski agrees — Juan IS too negative. It’s this very trait of his that leads to misery, and ruins multiple relationships (sometimes with parallel versions of the same woman). The book slows down to a fever dream as Juan collapses in on himself — pushing forward but beset by constant doubts and fears.

The parallel selves in this one universe

This first portion of the book focuses on the implications of parallel universes and one of the questions is about what makes a person … them. Is someone with your memories you?

It is so … poetic that this is a book I read but mostly forgot about.

Like most people, I’m not crazy about the idea of dying. But as I’ve read about, well, life, one of the things that comes up is that a version of us is always dying.

Almost 30 years ago a version of me with a lot less experience and knowledge read this book. Some of it stuck with me, but on reading it a second time I imagine a lot of it went over my head.

Except I don’t know for sure if it did. That version of me is long gone — replaced probably a hundred times over by different versions of myself as I learned and changed and gained new experiences.

I’ve been married for over 15 years. I’ve been a parent for over a decade. I’m a long way from the teenager who read this book. If I could somehow talk to my past self, I would probably connect about as well as I connect with my own son right now. I mean, I just assumed most of this book went over my head, but I know I was a pretty smart kid! That’s a real adult assumption to make of me, and young me would’ve been irritated by it.

My point is, as a kid I was terrified of death. But that kid already ceased to exist a long time ago. He died and didn’t realize it, because someone very similar (but not exactly the same) took his place. That is strangely comforting to me.

Back to the book! It drags a little bit as he works out the implications of parallel universes in Juan’s particularly cynical matter, but it starts to pick up again when he and his team decide that they’re going to solve the main mystery that has been hanging over everything they’ve done.

Where did the starcrossers go?

The ships and the frames represent a universe-spanning work of engineering unlike anything ever seen before. The fueling stations inside the stars actually feed each other and power the ships and the frames, pooling massive amounts of energy.

And yet, all of it is abandoned, still functioning only because the builders of these universal engineering projects (they start calling them “starcrossers” although there’s no real reason why — everyone just starts using that name) are SO GOOD at building! So where did they go? Why did they abandon their works? Why did they seemingly disappear from the universe?

Throughout the book they throw out a lot of theories. Maybe they transitioned to beings made of energy and have no need for physical ships anymore. Maybe the “variant effect” brought about by frame-based travel destabilized their very existence the more they used it, and they eventually just blinked out. Maybe they achieved immortality and had no more need to reproduce, so only a few of them are out there, kicking around the universe still. Maybe (and this is legit a proposed explanation) they accomplished so much and realized it didn’t matter, and they all retired to a farming planet to live out their days.

Here, Zebrowski does something that I really respect because I don’t think a lot of authors would have the guts. He provides an answer.

I do think this is crazy. Most authors would’ve left the mystery a mystery, content to tease readers and then go “it’s all a metaphor anyway! You don’t need to know!” Zebrowski does no such thing.

Juan and his team board a ship, intent on finding the original builders of these systems. Because of their unified desire and familiarity with the ships, the ship based AI can read their intention well enough to take them to where the builders have gone.

The starcrossers knew that, no matter what they did, their universe would eventually die either in a big crunch (gravity pulls all matter back together to form a massive singularity like a reverse big bang) or a big freeze (the existing matter in the universe continues to expand and cool until all energy is exhausted, sometimes called “the heat death of the universe”). At first, they tried to engineer the universe to avoid this, using the web of star bases. Eventually they discovered that wouldn’t work because the universe that currently exists has fixed laws — like Entropy.

But in creating their sun bases they discovered how to travel in sub space (to travel inside a sun) and also how to travel in what the book calls “Super space” — the area outside of our known universe.

(I am butchering the physics here — Zebrowski does a much better job explaining things — but I’m doing the best I can given that this blog post is already insanely long)

One of the theories of our universe is that multiple universes exist separate from each other, each self contained, floating in a sort of cosmic void. Each universe has it’s own laws of physics, traits, timeline, etc. (for example, one universe might be dominated by antimatter, while ours is biased towards matter). The starcrossers found out how jump into this super space where they were outside of universes, looking in.

They realized that, if they couldn’t modify this universe to remove entropy, they could just build their own, with physical laws that allowed for immortality without the risk of death at the end of the universe. The ship takes the crew to superspace outside the universe engineered by the starcrossers, and they use a frame to travel into it, where they find the builders, represented as … well, let me just quote:

Gradually [Juan] saw that he was slipping through a red plenum of shapes — round, oval, long, and thin — all soft and transparent with other forms inside them. … Joy stirred within him, but it was not his own …

As he looked out from this storm’s eye, he noticed that the organisms not only circled, but also danced in short, jagged fits — up, down, and sideways — and shook once in a while. He felt this motion within himself.

The swirling mass around him parted, and he saw distance spaces, around which galaxies of orange, yellow, and green shapes also did their kaleidoscopic dance. Suddenly they entered each other, radiating a great sense of pleasure and satisfaction. Alien joy burgeoned within him.

…

“They constantly reshape themselves,” he said, “to please each other, and find this satisfying. All that we surmised must be true … Entropy is constant here … the gamelike, goal-oriented aspects of life are nonexistent. Only play exists, if we can call it that.”

It is … interesting. I think it would be almost impossible to fulfill the image we build up over the course of the book of what the starcrossers would be, and the chapter does end up being somewhat disappointing, but I don’t know that anyone could do better. How do you represent the life of godlike beings who created their own universe? Even if he didn’t quite knock it out of the park, I admire the fact that he attempted it.

Two of Juan’s team stay in the universe, their individuality subsumed in the starcrossers dance. Juan tries to convince them to come back:

“If superspace contains both natural and deliberate universes, then you don’t have to settle for this one. We can find others, see what they offer!”

Magnus nodded as he turned end over end. “You want to go and find them?”

“Yes,” Juan said, feeling a new passion kindling within himself.

“You will always be going.”

This is one of the main themes of the book — that humanity is defined by yearning. Here Juan finds a universe designed by beings vastly more intelligent than humanity in order to create an eternity of pure joy, and what does he say? Don’t settle for this one! There’s others out there! Maybe we’ll find a better one!

As Magnus puts it in the book: “We were made to be empty, then to be filled, emptied and filled. We don’t know, then we do. We forget, and remember. We learn, and need more knowledge. We’re a two-position switch, or a sieve which longs to be full. Satisfied, it would miss the longing.”

But what does it all mean, Zebrowski!?

I’ve read a lot of science fiction and I think the reason I don’t remember this book as well as others is because Zebrowski just …. ties it all up in a neat bow!

See, the goal of much of science fiction is to get people thinking. Maybe thinking about the future, maybe about themselves, maybe dreaming of possibilities. Lots of different reasons, but the overall goal is usually to get people thinking.

To do that, they very frequently don’t tie up loose ends or explain what everything means. Maybe (as I hinted at above) it’s because they don’t know how to answer their own question in a satisfying way. But often it’s a deliberate choice in order to engage people’s curiosity.

Think of the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey — the book or the movie (although the book provides more answers than the movie). Where is Dave going when he enters the monolith? What kind of transport is he seeing? Why does he see a sort of retro-futuristic room? Why does he keep seeing different versions of himself? Why does the monolith reappear? Why does (presumably) he appear as a space fetus?

It gets you thinking, right?

Now imagine if all that happened and then you see Dave talking to Hal and he says (and I’m specifically choosing wrong interpretations here):

“You wouldn’t believe it if I told you, Hal, but Im going to anyway you rascally AI! See, the monolith was actually just a big TV! And I got so close to it that when it showed a trippy pink floyd music video, I thought I was travelling to the stars! Well, then the aliens made me a little house but they don’t understand interior design and it was pretty weird, but I decided to live there until I became an old man, just doing normal house things like eating and breaking glasses on accident and dying in my velour sheets. And then, wouldn’t you know it, they sent in another TV! And it showed that movie, where Brad Pitt ages backwards? Well, I figured they were giving me a hint, so I tried just aging backwards and, wouldn’t you know, it worked! But I got to the fetus point and I was like “I should go forward again” so I started doing that and then I came and found you and now we’re going to tour the nation and tell our tale of wonder and mystery!”

See, that wouldn’t be as affecting an ending, now would it? Even if the explanation were something a little more … meaningful than mine, by tying everything up you don’t engage with the consumers own sense of curiosity.

Anyway, Zebrowski does that. The last chapter is Juan thinking to himself while he showers and moves some boxes in the attic. The entire time he’s basically digging in to all the themes that ran like invisible ocean currents through the narrative. Themes like the meaning of life, and whether an omnipotent God would be a good thing or not. With the final lines, he summarizes his personal meaning of life:

He heard footsteps and turned to see Lena, Magnus, and Malachi in the open doorway. The sight of them flooded him with recognition, and he swam through their most private regions, liberated beyond himself with a new gift of childhood.

His friends were here and it was time to play.

Much like the starcrossers, the ultimate meaning of life for Juan (and likely Zebrowski) is in social connections and the joy of sparking happiness in each other. And Juan (and likely Zebrowski) contend that we don’t need eternity or a deliberately created universe. We just need a place and people to share it with.

I think by summarizing the point of his book Zebrowski makes it less memorable than it could have been. In all honesty, it’s just not the best writing. But much like his chapters about the starcrossers, I don’t resent him going his own way and saying exactly what he wanted to say. I can’t fault him for taking a dozen pages to say “NO! THIS is what my book was about!”

Final Thoughts

Zebrowski passed away late last year at the age of 78. He wasn’t a household name, but he and his partner, Pamela Sargent, seemed to have done what they wanted to do with their lives. They wrote, and spent time together. They played.

There is very little additional information about him, which is … strange, but also, to me, appropriate given the themes of this book. Themes I would say I mostly agree with (although my explanation of it is much less thorough than his).

Should you read this book?

Honestly? I don’t know. I would probably recommend fifty books ahead of this one, but I wouldn’t NOT recommend it. If I saw someone reading it I would be excited to talk to them about it.

Much like any of us, humanity is continually dying and reinventing itself. A library is a great representation of this. Every year they buy hundreds or thousands of books, but if you go back to that exact same library a decade later, how many of those books remain? I could go back to the library of my youth today and it’s been up for over a century. How many of the books initially purchased for that library are still there?

Some! But not many. Maybe 1% of what is published in any given year gains a permanent place in the lexicon of humanity. For every Plato there are millions of people who live, record something of themselves, and then disappear forever.

I think Zebrowski was fine with that, and I would guess he knew that his works probably weren’t part of the 1% for that year that would live forever. But it was meaningful for me as a teen, and again nearly 30 years later. That’s a strange accomplishment in and of itself. I wished I’d read this just a few years earlier and I could’ve reached out and told him his story meant something to me (even if this wasn’t the kindest review I’ve ever written). But it’s also fitting that I didn’t.