Darwin's Radio : In the next stage of evolution, humans are history...

Rating:
Summary: *snore*
Review: Usually when books are badly written and implausible, they can occasionally still be fun to read. This is not the case here.

This book was recommended to me by someone who is supposed to read a lot. Now I question that, and I wonder what it is exactly that he has been reading. Certainly not good science fiction.

While this book had the potential to be very interesting, the author fails miserably both in terms of the science and the character development. For a great part of the novel, the reader must feel that the characters are running about willy-nilly with no sense of purpose. I think Bear could have also delved more deeply into the science, but probably didn't because the premise was so weak to begin with.

I am neither a creationist nor an evolutionist (let's remember that they are both currently just theories), but my dislike of this book has nothing to do with that. It's just a really boring bad book.

Rating:
Summary: Not vintage Bear
Review: As at his best Bear tackles the end of the Rule of Man. In Blood Music IT takes over, and in Forge of Good the Earth is destroyed by aliens. I really liked both of those books. Hard science is deftly woven together with human drama to from riveting stories.
Darwin's Radio is even more ambitious: here we are attacked by our own DNA. The topic is brilliant, and the science is as flawless as it can get in a science fiction story.
However, here Bear's particular magic doesn't seem to work. There is a lot of technical dialogue, and a lot of slightly dysfunctional characters. In my opinion they do not blend well. Sometimes when I was reading I wondered where the story had gone. When something happens it is described in the same detached way everything else is described. I lack the passionate writing of the early Bear; the Bear of The Infinity Concierto" or Strength of Stones.

Rating:
Summary: Good concept, but writing cannot sustain it.
Review: To put it bluntly, Greg Bear's limitations as a writer hinder this book. If he had cut it down by 100-150 pages, it would've been a focused and thrilling novel. As it stands, the book meanders. The paeans to Democrats and villification of Republicans do not mesh with the theme. The idea behind the book is gripping enough that I finished it, but more from the standpoint of wanting to find out how it ended. If there would've been a two page summary, I would've probably preferred it to the last portion.

Rating:
Summary: Waste of a very good idea
Review: I liked the idea of rapid speciation. It seemed promising. But what did I get? Probably half the book discussing about politics, and unveiled reffrences to modern day personas and companies. But let's start with:

Good things - The description of the mob. It was skillfully made. But the really good parts were so rare and far in between, I was left unsatisfied.
The science. Not rock solid but call it possible in an alternate and not so diffrent universe. I was reading Dawkins at the same time as this book, and Bear's hypothesis isn't far-fetched.
The end. Towards it, either I got used to Bear's writing, or it somehow improved.
The suspense. Kaye's pregancy, the outcome of the virus, the unfolding of Mitch's dream provided enough desire to keep on reading.

Bad things - Boring, boring politics, and politic talk. There were some pages I wanted to just throw the damn thing out the window.
Centered too much on America. Apart from very few reffrences to the rest of the world (one town-size country like Georgia)...um, hello? Where are the rest of the continents? Where are all the conclusions drawn from the experience of Europe's and, I don't know, Asia's way of dealing with it? Where are all the world scientists? A poor country's goverment would not have had money to control things, children would probably be born free and mingle with old-style humans. Half of America's paranoia would be wiped out by info coming from the outside. Reading it I had the distinct feeling I was watching one of those Hollywood movies in which the aliens _always_ land in America.
Literature is suppose to be good enough to be pleasant to be read, and being Sci-fi does not extept it from that. And good literature can be good today and 50 years from now, also the characters stand on their description, and not being part of head-line news, and it's ideas do not age. Not being American made some of the book quite irrelevant.

I give it three stars (Mediocre).It's interesting, if you self-edit it down and skim through half of it, but not a great literary achievement.

Rating:
Summary: Bear tries to be Crichton
Review: ... but fails. And it's not clear he should have tried to be Crichton: going for John Brunner would have been a better idea. Bear has tried to do a technothriller, and scores one on the scientific front (if you suspend all disbelief, of course), but makes a too-long novel, too generous on the room meetings and on the riots.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent hard-core scifi!
Review: Having loved scifi when young, I've become jaded over the years with the gendre. I guess it's because I love science, and so much of scifi strays pretty far from science and into fantasy (it's hard to enjoy a novel when you're rolling your eyes!)
Darwin's Radio brings back my old fondness of scifi: the science is plausible, the main characters have real virtues & vices, and there's plenty of little twists to keep it interesting. Yes, many of the peripheral characters are 2 dimensional, and the story does drag a bit toward the end.
As an adult working in science, it's way cool to read a ripping good yarn which relates to my every day world--topics & research that I always read about, but is rarely appreciated outside of work.