| SF Reviews by Aaron M. Renn | By Author - By Title - By Date Reviewed |
Conclusion: Worth Reading
I thought some of the prose and dialog was clunky, and I had a problem with a couple of the scientific premises of the story, but I still managed to find this a quick and entertaining read. The story's premise was spectacular, and Bear does a great job of making it seem credible and even possible. This is a work of true hard science fiction, a subgenre that Bear is a master of.
The plot is pretty straightforward. Endogenous retroviruses (bits of leftover viruses that we incorporated into our own DNA) have started becoming active, and what's more infectious. The viruses cause a disease nicknamed "Herod's flu" because it causes miscarriages. Kaye Lang is a biologist who predicted that infectious endogenous retroviruses were possible, and she gets swept up into the battle to understand and contain this new infection. But is it really a disease? The more Lang learns, the less sure she is. And what she suspects is really going on could change humanity forever.
Bear buttresses his story with tons of scientific details. Perhaps a bit too many. There are several times in the book where I thought I was listening to a university lecture on biology instead of reading a novel. You can learn some things this way, nice buzzwords if nothing else, but I thought it interfered with the story. Also, a lot of the characters didn't work for me. Particularly a few of the CDC/HIH bureaucrats seemed like characatures of government workers. Their dialog about hyping up different health threats seemed a bit overdone. But then the more I thought about it, the more I realized how probably true it was. After all, the Waco Massacre started out as a publicity stunt by the ATF to help it secure more federal funding.
In a work of hard SF like this, scientific plausibility is a must. As I said, this book largely delivers, but there were a couple of things I had a problem with. First, Bear claims many times that the likeliest cause of the spontaneous expression of these viruses is environmental stress from modern living. This Malthusian belief could have come straight out of the Environmental Defense Fund Newsletter. By many standards, humans are living in an environment much less stressful than in times past. Even the third world has made dramatic strides in reducing mortality and increasing quality of life. Food is more abundant than ever. Modern medicine has cured many diseases that formerly scourged the planet. When I think back on things like the Black Plague, I can't really believe that we live in some uniquely stressful time for humanity. Quite the opposite in fact.
The other bothersome thing was how Bear pointed to gaps in the fossil record to provide evidence for his claim that current notions of evolution are wrong. Creationists have pointed at this for years as evidence of the Divine origins of life, and have been roundly lambasted for it. Now someone who embraces evolution (at least in this book, and I presume in real life) points to this as a "problem" and wouldn't you know it just happens to have a "solution" that preserves an evolutionary basis for the origins of life. You can't play it both ways boys. If there's a problem with the fossil record, then it's a problem right now, not just when you have a solution for it, even a fictional one.
I'm not bringing this up in order to argue that the world is 6,000 years old. It was just something that bugged me.
But despite its problems, I thought this was a good, solid book. It's an excellent pick for anyone who likes their SF diamond hard, but is good enough as a story to appeal to those who don't. Also, I think this could have good mainstream crossover success. Books about viruses -- for example, The Hot Zone -- have done well with the general public, and I think this novel could too.
%A Bear, Greg %T Darwin's Radio %I Del Rey %D 1999-09 %G ISBN 0-345-42333-X %P 430 pp. %O hardcover, US$24.00
Reviewed on 1999-10-02
Just Say No to Frames, Ads, and Animated GIF's