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Darwin's Radio by Greg Bear
Jan. 26th, 2008 04:36 pmA 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.
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.
