“The Tree of Life” is a philosophical adventure fantasy. The novel is interesting, first of all, not for its characters or plot twists, but for its ideas, the author’s concept of social existence. This philosophical concept is based on an unconventional understanding of the future of humanity, emphatically non-politicized, focused on the integration of the natural world and the human world into a single self-organizing system of the Earth. In the creation of a comprehensive artificial intelligence - the Supermind, consisting of the Minds of all “living in it”, the author sees the possibility of a person achieving “immortality”. “If humanity lives only for itself, is it expedient? We exist in a Great Self-Organizing System called the Cosmos... Who are we, the bearers of intelligence, in this huge system? Parasites that no one needs, living only for themselves, or a stage and part of the development of this system?” The novel “The Tree of Life” is an attempt to give answers to all these questions in artistic form. At the same time, the author remains primarily a scientist trying to put into artistic form scientific ideas about the catastrophic nature of the future and possible ways out of the coming crisis.

Second edition, corrected and expanded.