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Blood Music

Blood Music

List Price: $6.99
Your Price: $6.29
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Genetic thriller apocalypse odyssey
Review: Beware, there are some things in this review to spoil some surprises if you haven't read it yet. It's worth reading, OK (and did pick up both a Hugo and a Nebula, so it's not just my opinion).

The first third to half of this felt like you were sitting in a taut, well made thriller film. Virgil is a classic tool to set up an action/slight SF plot - a gifted geneticist, socially inept, is caught out doing shonky private research on the company time, and in a classy scene told he has two hours to destroy all his stuff. He manages to hide the most crucial enhanced 'learning' cells he's been working on, but eventually can only smuggle them out by injecting them in his own body - a crazy act, but he can't bear the thought of losing years of successful research. The stuff will probably die anyway, although of course it shouldn't have been let out of carefully quarantined conditions. All this presented skilfully, with the pseudo-scientific dialogue (how would I know) not abusing your suspension of disbelief.

Of course weird things start happening, and he calls on his friend (and seeming ideal hero vehicle), Edward, a Doctor and Harrison Ford style intelligent and resourceful (but still sort of everyman) figure. Has Virgil potentially unleashed a deadly virus? And who are these suspicious CIA types in the background - there was actually defence research secretly happening at Virgil's lab: are we squaring off for a standard little man against the establishment, using his wits to unravel the mystery while on the run, finally using whatever the discovery is to cleverly resolve the book? There's even a powerful potential mini-resolution relatively early on that Bear could have built up to as a satisfactory conclusion.

I would have enjoyed that, and I'm pretty sure he could have pulled it off nicely.

But the novel veers. First into, 'Oh, ok, he's sliding into Spiderman territory: the microbes in Virgil's body are reconstructing him, making him invulnerable to disease, attractive to women, and giving him superhuman powers.' Again, not what I was expecting, but, sure, lets run with it.

But then the novel careers. We've got a plague on our hands - that casually wipes out North America in a couple of days. We're now in a holocaust novel following around a few anomalous survivors. Meanwhile, over in Europe, a researcher has bravely taken his infection to an isolation tank so he can be studied as he dies. He starts communicating with the cells within him - they are intelligent and myriad.

The scope just keeps growing - now the cells are challenging our view of humanity: they're more like an alien species with Godlike powers. It's an odyssey, with basic questions about reality and life and identity.

Quite a ride - a writer who could put out a very decent thriller who is an SF thinker at heart - he keeps on throwing in new, 'Yeah, but what if's' along the way, any one or two of which would probably sustain a whole other book for someone else. We do lose out a bit on character, perhaps, because of this, but the people are not gallingly one dimensional, and are enjoyable as the sort of larger than life people you'd expect to meet in a decently cast slick film. Somehow, while not being as tight as it could have been, the book manages to cohere while wildly changing direction.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Exhilarating Adrenaline Rush & Great Speculative Fiction!
Review: Looking for a book so good you drop everything else and get behind on all that stuff you should be doing? This is one of those books!

This had the same derail-my-other-projects distraction factor as King's "The Stand," Case's "The Genesis Code," Preston's "The Hot Zone," and assorted other favorite thrillers. Reading "Blood Music" felt like a ride on a really fast train. Even when I had a good idea of where we were going, the ride there was exhilarating.

"Blood Music" is also a great piece of speculative fiction. Lovers of hard SF will appreciate the solid science foundation. People who don't care about hard SF for its own sake will find "Blood Music" all the more creepy because it is oh-so-believable.

Greg Bear is excellent. If you have not read him, this is a great start. If you like him and missed this, buy it now. If you wait, you'll be sorry you did when you finally get around to reading "Blood Music."

If you read this and would like more Greg Bear, try "The Forge of God."

For more plague fiction by someone you may not have read, try Connie Willis's "The Domesday Book."

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: A disappointment
Review: I'm always on the look out for great SF books, and I decided to try this one after hearing how this was a classic SF novel. Well, if you are like me and interested in thought-provoking reading (and also need a good story to carry it) than I would not recommend reading this book.

The main plot is
1. scientist discovers plague
2. plague takes over America
3. plague is actually next evolution for human species

Now I believe pretty much anyone can write an end-of-the-world novel and make it at least somewhat compelling, and surely this book is an acceptable page turner. But there are several problems with Blood Music that left me disappointed.

First, the initial discovery and explanation of the noocytes (individual cells that are intelligent) is poorly done. Bear does a hack job of really explaining this at a biological level and I was never convinced.

Second, the idea of an intelligent plague is an intriguing one, but is has been used for a better end in other books, most notably Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card. Bear never really builds up the ethical dilemma of what does it mean if we eradicate this disease.

Third, any end-of-the-world novel is going to need to seem epic in nature. The Stand by Stephen King is I think a great example. You really need more character's viewpoints to get the whole picture. Instead, we are given about five characters to follow. This leads to another problem:

Fourth, the characters are very poorly done. Virgil, Edward, Bernard - all three are pretty much interchangable as they go through their plague symptoms. Bear uses a lot of strange syntax to show their mental states, but it is confusing to read. Also, for some reason his plague survivors are all mentally deficient, so we have to follow characters around that don't really provide any thought-provoking moments.

Fifth, I was irked by the poor editing of this book. It seems to be at a high school level. Besides the numerous typos, there are many examples where someone is talking and it is not at all clear who it is. The whole book really stands out to me as a low class effort by both author and editor. It is originally from 1985, but maybe it should have been re-edited for the 2000 edition.

Finally, we have this whole idea of the plague really being a next evolution of humanity. This is fine. But by the end we never really resolve anything. What exactly is the next evolution beyond the noocytes? Bear dissolves into this pseudo-sciency mumbo jumbo and as far as I can tell all humans join this sphere that flies off into space. Hmmm. He could have asked a lot more interesting questions with his premise along the way. For example, if human personalities are integrated into the plague, can new personalities appear or will no new humans ever be born? He skims over some other interesting points - what about evil humans that join the utopian-like plague, is there a point to the plague to actually accomplish anything?

Overall Bear is playing with some grand ideas, but many authors have taken these same ideas to greater heights. When you write a book of this low quality and have bad characters, it is hard to pull off that epic and transcendent experience that he seems to be going for at the end. So my advice to you is look elsewehere for a good SF book. Here are three related recommendations, Contact by Carl Sagan, Speaker for the Dead - OSC, and The Stand - by Stephen King.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Compelling and throughly enjoyable
Review: I first read this book as a disillusioned teenager and it restored my faith in SF. I have just re read Blood Music for the third time and it has lost none of its potency. If anything it was more enjoyable reading it 8 years later with the weight of experience giving the story even greater depth and texture. Greg bear has the intensity of William Gibson (without the nihilism) the technical savvy of Larry Niven and the world Building skills of Robert Forward. My only regret would be that it is too short and a little thin on characterization (lessons learned in Songs of Earth and Power could be well applied here) To the reader from PA who found the story too "fantastic" I would urge you to considder the full implications of Heisenbergs Uncertainty Principal. Observation does indeed have a tangible effect on reality. There is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in your philosophies. A critical mind is a good thing to have and nurture but don't allow it to blind you to the fantastic :)

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: My favorite SF book of all time
Review: I've been reading SF since the 1960's and I've re-read this book 3 times. Bear takes a simple Frankenstein science moment and extrapolates it out into the the most extreme human singularity story imaginable. He seems to have fully considered every conceivable outcome of the idea of the uncontrolled release of intelligent microorganisms. Beginning with a basic disenfranchised bio researcher injecting himself with his own designer organisms, he explores all the human, physchological, physical, and ultimately metaphysical outcomes of that first moment.

The conclusion is breathtaking and left me pondering the whole idea for several weeks.

Bear's writing has certainly improved in the years since he wrote Blood Music, and the thinly outlined characters in this book are a tad annoying but the incredible evolution of his concept succeeds in overcoming this limitation. A must read!

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Virgil destroys the world
Review: One of Bear's more popular works from the Eighties, "Blood Music" tells of the takeover of the living world by a thinking, reproducing nanotechnological being. What throws another interesting curve into the mix is that the character you presume will be the central character for the whole novel is in fact killed off before the midway point.

A major idea/fear expressed in this book, and in Michael Crichton's new novel "Prey", is that the end of human life on earth will probably not come about as a result of conventional weapons of mass destruction, but rather from more subtle and insidious biological science that we don't have enough perspective to know to NOT tamper with.

Good book - a breezy yet thought-stirring work. Recommended.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: This is the way the World ends...
Review: Greg Bear's masterpiece "Blood Music" is astonishing. Compelling. Breathtaking. Horrifying. It is a remarkably deft, cogent, pithy little sorcerous book from the Master of "Big Idea" science fiction, so gripping and lucidly written that it will take about three hours to read through it, and three years to think through its implications.

Bear's anti-hero is the socially inept but staggeringly brilliant Vergil Ulam, a cellular biologist who makes a startling discovery with genetically modified human leukocytes (white blood cells Ulam has been tampering with), attempts to contact a rival genetic researcher, gets caught, and promptly finds himself out of a job and---more importantly---out of a laboratory. With a discovery in hand that could catapult him to the forefront of the field of nanotechnology (the science of creating molecular-level machines that are capable of self-replication), what's a Mad Scientist to do?

He injects himself with the little nanites, of course, and then goes out on the town.

Greg Bear is a consummately gifted science fiction thinker who typically sacrifices character development, plot, and pacing to the more visceral and esoteric ramifications of the science at the core of his stories. "Blood Music", then, is even more of a rare gem, a book in which Bear's scientific acumen and literary craftsmanship come together.

In the first few chapters, "Blood Music" takes on the pace and grue of a horror novel. At first the nanites in Ulam's body do nothing, and the scientist suspects they've been consumed and destroyed; then it becomes apparent that the modified leukocytes are reinventing Ulam, improving him, making benign little modifications: restoring his eyesight overnight, improving his stamina, and tucking his spine under a sheath of flesh (the better to protect it, of course).

But as with the rest of Bear's best work, "Blood Music" wants to push further into the dark territory of the possible: the nanites get out of control, escape by the billions into society, and start reinventing humanity according to their own internal "blood music." The novel begins as a whimsical romp at the periphery of scientific knowledge, picks up momentum as an apocalyptic horror tale, and then---oddly enough---ends almost optimistically, playing with Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. The best part of "Blood Music" are the constant, unexpected shifts and changes: just when you think you know where the novel is heading, Bear masterfully, and nastily, alters course.

The field of nanotechnology has come a long way since Bear wrote "Blood Music", and much of what was theoretical then is very possible---if not already in application---now. With that in mind, "Blood Music" is a delicious and unforgettable journey into the horror and hope of a mysterious and powerful science, and one of the classics of modern science fiction.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: One of the Best Biotech/Nanotech Books Ever
Review: Greg Bear originally wrote Blood Music as a short story but then later expanded it into a full-length novel. It is one of the classic and seminal works of biotech/nanotech fiction (for a more recent take on this subject, check out Kathleen Goonan's Queen City Jazz). This is a book that has everything for the sci-fi fan; great characters, great plot, great science, and a mind-blowing ending. This is a must-read!

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: A good foundation leads to chilling speculation
Review: Greg gave the appearance of knowing his science in this book. It felt convincing. It showed an important part about scientific squabbling and reminded us of the arrogance of "being the only one who knows". The two most significant characters, the scientist who started the "change" and the one who offers himself up as an experiment are drawn well, and work in a consistent manner with their characterizations. The ending is not something I would want, given my individual tastes, but the fact that many characters find it desirable is a credit to Greg's thinking.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Interesting premise, lousy edition.
Review: I enjoyed the book, but my enjoyment was tempered by annoyance at the sheer number of typographical errors in this edition. It's almost as if they couldn't afford a copyeditor.


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