Rating: 
Summary: Good, but muddy going.
Review: As the other reviewers have mentioned, the book has a sigificant amount of technical jargon, most of which I was able to gloss by without resorting to the glossary of terms. I found the story interesting, but the end left me wanting. The story certainly reminds me of Bear's other work "Blood Music", which in my opinion was much better. I would start with it first.
Rating: 
Summary: A Scientific Thriller
Review: If you liked Stephen King's "The Stand" and most of Michael Crighton's works, you should love this book. I had to chuckle that the technical depth of this book led Greg to include a glossary of terms in the back! The premise is fascinating and the book is filled with surprises. I thoroughly enjoyed this book.
Rating:
Summary: Darwin's Radio - metaphor gone awry!
Review: This is a fast-paced adventure in ideas, genetics & evolution. As the clues & scenes unfold, the idea that we are not the unchanging acme of our species becomes more & more apparent. While scientists bicker, citizens riot & politicians placate, there are groups of scientists scrambling for answers in their labs, doctors wrestling with mass miscarriages & bureaucrats intentionally bungling data. In other words, all hell is breaking loose. Some of this latest Greg Bear saga is eminently readable, flowing & fluent, as is this author's trademark; some of it reads like an abbreviated Genetics for Dummies. I managed to stay the course.
Rating:
Summary: Politics of science and academia 1, human relations 0
Review: The excitement in the first two-thirds of this book are derived from the wonderful portrayal of the politics of science and the politics of academic science. Darwin's Radio provides a very believable description of the way politicians and scientists have to think in order to get funding -- either from grants, or from the private sector. The dramatic tension drove me from page to page here.But when the story turns more personal, it felt like Bear was just playing out the string, waiting for the sequel. The dramatic tension builders felt like set pieces. A lot of craft, but not so much heart. At the end, Bear set me up for the opportunity to find out what he thinks the next step towards a better world should be, if he has the courage to take that on. But perhaps utopia is just too much for any author to take on. Let it slide, I'd say.
Rating: 
Summary: 100% plot, no characterization
Review: If you enjoy books where the virus is the most rounded and interesting character, or think people actually speak dialogue like "We can't target the LPC messenger RNA in the cytoplasm because our current ribozymes do not recognize the mutated form," (I am not making this up; see p. 268), or enjoy books with 5-page glossaries of scientific terms at the end, this book's for you. The human characters are motiveless, flat, dull, boring, etc. and are just moved on- and off-stage by the author to speak this sort of scientific babble. Snickers at religious people and politicians. The plot is kind of interesting but could have been written on a 3 x 5 card. Not recommended unless you go in for this sort of thing; I do enjoy an occasional science fiction story but not this one.
Rating:
Summary: Strong beginning but weak conclusion
Review: Darwin's Radio had a really intriguing start, compelling body, but wimpy conclusion. I really enjoyed the "hard science" and the conflict between politics vs science, but in the final analysis, the characters were boring and very stereotypical -I am referring specifically to Kaye & Mitch. During most of their dialog with each other, I felt as if I was reading something out of a romance novel instead of SciFi. It's a toss up which was more nauseating...Kaye's transformation from an intelligent, educated, prominent woman of science to a mere breeder, or Mitch's sudden change from anthropologist to a he-man, mr. macho type. Get real, Mr. Bear, people do not surrender their individual identities just because they happen to become parents!
Rating:
Summary: Very interesting science, poor fiction
Review: I was wrapped up in Darwin's Radio up through the first half. And I nearly gave up on it in the second half because the story started making very little scense. It was challenging, especially heavy science passages, and made me think. The idea behind this novel is very thoroughly researched and is convincingly portrayed. Bear has a great idea with the science but looses it with the fiction. The story is so wrapped up around the main scientist characters that the reader only gets to see the world around them through very dark glasses. So much so that I had difficulty picturing the action taking place in my head. In my mind the action took place without any scenery, I had only images of the characters with no background. As someone who was trained to be a scientist I found the description of the scientist characters to be real but little else of the book was real to me. For example, citizens all around the country are protesting, sometimes violently, and the reader never learns why the protests are happening. All we read about are the protestors. Surely there must be some leaders who could tell the reader which side the protestors are on, government, schentist or their own. Perhaps I couldn't read the evidence in the book but I had no idea if the many protests that occurred were connected or not. Were these people protesting the same thing or were they protesting different things. It was never explained. Also the environment in which the main characters existed seemed to be different from where the rest of the population existed. In one scene 4 senators and eleven other citizens are killed in a riot in Washington DC in another troops are cracking down on protestors and finally a high level political assassination occurs, and the main characters are able to travel across the country without any concern for their own safety as though nothing extraordinary was going on. I would have thought that after all that violence some kind of restrictions on travel would be in effect. The action reads as if the main characters and the rest of the country are existing in two different books. A novel that was equally enjoyable and annoying.
Rating:
Summary: Somewhat entertaining
Review: The hard science bit of the book was somewhat entertaining, and I did enjoy the conflict of science and politics. I found most of the characters to be almost completely flat and totally uncompelling. Somehow, the more the author tries to push the characters beyond caricature and stereotype, the more stereotypical they become. The story structure was predictable. Once you figure out what's going on scientifically (usually before the supposedly brilliant scientists in the book), you have to plow through reams of inane dialog and description to get anywhere interesting. If someone wanted to borrow this book from me, I wouldn't advise against it, but I definitely wouldn't recommend it.
Rating: 
Summary: Thought provoking
Review: I'm 2/3rds of the way into this book and it just keeps getting more intriguing. I find it especially interesting in light of the current project underway to map the human genome. If you enjoy intellectual entertainment, read this book. You wont regret it.
Rating:
Summary: Possibly the ultimate hard science fiction biological novel
Review: I have allways held a strange opinion about Greg Bear. I thought him to be a quite a good writer, but I simply haven't read anything by him I loved. I read a few short stories, and 'Foundation and Chaos', and they were all good, but nothing to addict me. Alas, neither was "'Darwin's Radio" But don't let that stop you. Darwin's Radio is certainly worth reading. I'll start with what I didn't like. The characters, while all different, didn't seem all that interesting. The only one I really cared about was Christopher, and to a lesser extent Saul. They were different and came alive. Bear spent alot of time about the rest of the characters, especially Kaye and Mitch, but I never cared for them, or for the romance. The other main complain, is that there really isn't too much of a plot. The book is marked as a Techno thriler, but there really isn't any action or advature. The characters are more or less passive spectators, watching Sheva, speculating about it, and trying to survive the catastrophes the world throws at them. In a sense, there's no story here. OK. Then why should you read the book? Simply, because the ideas behind it are mind blowing, and well explained. Yeah, sometimes I was lost in the science, but I truly enjoyed Bear's scientific imagination. Bear does something that science fiction rarely does - he expands scientific ideas, and he should be commanded for that. Also, the book deserve notice for Bear's ability to make the scientific method, and the scientists, not only comprehensible but also fascinating. The tensest moments of the novel are scientifical exchanges of ideas and theories. At its best, you read with wide eyes as characters present incredible ideas, that seem strangely likely.
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