Macroscope

I have always viewed this book as the best Piers Anthony to be found. It deals with the idea, remarkable for its time, (1969), that even though we cannot go physically interstellar, we can get an internet connection. The resultant cost to the people in charge of the connection is well done. If you are going to read only one Piers anthony...this is the book.

MACROSCOPE is a triumph of weirdness. Lots of strange flashbacks, great pseudoscience jargon and concepts. Anthony plays with time and linearity like lesser writers do with mere words. I don't know how representative MACROSCOPE is of Piers Anthony's work as a whole, but it stands on its own as a great piece of adventure writing with a twist of morality play.

Ivo Archer, a mixed-race individual created by a genius, and his scientist friends, steal a device to escape Earth's prejudices and confront the mind-altering signal. A powerful telescope detecting macrons, sub-light particles, reveals galactic civilizations, but contains a dangerous destroyer signal capable of mentally crippling high-IQ humans.

Anthony might be a decent writer if he wasn't so enthralled with misogyny

I was really not impressed by this one. The characters were flat and annoying (god spare me from The Girl Character), the plot was slow and incomprehensible by turns, and the bits of Hard Science SF (complete with little diagrams) were uninteresting.
The Xanth novels (even the lamer ones) or the Bio of a Space Tyrant series are better if you want to read some Anthony - or if you want some interesting speculative fiction, try Anderson's "A Harvest of Stars".

I wish I could say I remember this book better, but I don't. I read it years ago, and it was pretty typical of sci-fi at the time, a complicated journey though space, time, spiritualism and various other dimensions.

Science Fiction at its very best.