Darwin's Radio by Greg Bear

[lightreads]

A CDC disease chaser discovers a virus that seems to be asymptomatic in everyone but pregnant women, and mass graves in Georgia (the country) and a newly discovered family of forty thousand year old mummies suggest this isn’t the first outbreak. And our heroes -- that CDC disease hound, a successful biologist, and an anthropologist with questionable ethics -- begin to suspect it isn’t an outbreak at all.

Okay, so it’s not actually a ‘read a textbook instead’ science fiction book. I mean, the science is pretty cool -- endogenous retroviruses as an evolutionary vector, which is a pretty awesome explanation for the whole “yes but how does it work?” problem of punctuated evolution. And the writing is effective and observant, if a bit clumsy sometimes. Ooh, and there are actual people in this book, with actual people emotions and actual people foibles and actual people joys.

But -- you knew it was coming -- I really didn’t like it much. I think it’s that I hate hate hate people who are willfully wrong -- they’ve chosen a path, and okay yeah it’s becoming clear they’re wrong, but hell if they’ll do anything about it. And this book is full of them. I’m sort of torn, actually, because the descriptions of just what scientists and politicians would do faced with a disaster like this one are actually pretty accurate. It’s not a pretty picture, as well it shouldn’t be. But it’s exactly the sort of mess that drives me nuts on a personal level, and it all left a bad taste in my mouth.

That, and there’s something really awry with the pacing here. And some weirdness on the boy-girl front I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I hear Bear’s short fiction is more exciting. Hope so.

Comments

[nwhyte]

I felt rather ambiguous about it when I first read it. Stunned that it won the Nebula.

[lightreads.livejournal.com]

Yes, I had a similar thought. I got curious and looked up the Nebula ballot that year, and blinked to see Bujold's A Civil Campaign. And a generally strong slate otherwise. There may have been some reluctance to give it to Bujold again, particularly as she'd won for books in that series before, but still.

But, well, the Nebula voters are inexplicable. News at 11.

[readerjane]

Thanks for the review! I've been meaning to check out Greg Bear for awhile. Probably still will, but I won't choose DR as my starting point.

I was going to recommend Doomsday Book by Connie Willis as a similar alternative to DR, but after looking up endogenous retroviruses I realized it's not really similar at all. *g*

I'll still recommend DB, though. Willis' SF main focus is time paradox rather than the disease itself, but an epidemic plays a large part. DB is one of several stories where she posits that time travel (to the past only) has been achieved, but that nothing can be brought forward. So it's no use to treasure hunters and has remained largely the domain of historians. In DB... this is skirting a spoiler, but there are parallels between a historical disease outbreak and a contemporary one.

Willis' adventures tend to be madcap, but DB is more serious. I found myself caring a great deal about her characters, both the grad student who travels to the Middle Ages to research her dissertation and the people she stays with while there.

[lightreads.livejournal.com]

Yeah, like I said I keep hearing his short fiction is excellent, usually accompanied with a, "shame about his novels." Though I also hear that his book Blood Music is pretty good.

I have Doomsday Book, actually. I really liked her To Say Nothing of the Dog, which of course is nothing much at all like DB. I'll get around to DB one of these days. So. Many. Books.