Blood Music

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Summary: Im not impressed easily! Wow!!!
Review: This is a great book. I had never read Greg Bear before (and now I cant wait to read another). A friend of mine lent me this and I could not put it down. Very well written and intriguing!! I loved it. I never would have guessed the way he ended the book. I was completely amazed and he is on my list as a brilliant writer. Anyone want to suggest my next Greg Bear read? Feel free to email me. : )

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Summary: The best sf novel!!!
Review: BM totally nuked my mind!!! Imagination of this guy is too good. You gotto read BM. This is the very best novel even better than Neuromancer. Don't miss it.

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Summary: Got me hooked on Bear! Buy it NOW!
Review: I read Blood Music in an SFBC edition back when it was published and have re-read it several times since. Bear's imaginative vision of a world remade by intelligent microbes is frightening and riveting. Like characters in the novel who fly over an altered landscape, I could not look away. Along with Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, this goes down as the novel I most consistently recommend.

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Summary: Ultimately disappointing (sigh)
Review: The book starts and quickly assumes the tempo of a good medical thriller - however it quickly degenerates into a panopoly of psychobabble - One critically flawed assumption in the book is that the universe is inherently mutable - i.e. Bear takes the neo-deconstructivist view that the observer physically *shapes* the universe, and the even the holy laws of physics are merely "explanations" that can be changed by the simple act of mass observation. (i.e. the ``universe'', en-mass, "reacts" to the observation as if it were a physical object) This utterly fails the unwritten rule of good SF, which states that what ever pseudoscience one uses as a plot device must at least fall outside of what we KNOW as impossible. Unfortunately, Bear concerns himself(?) too much with this (incorrect) ``deconstructivist'' view of quantum mechanics and the latter parts of the book basically falls short - i.e. the characters become superfluous and are basically portrayed as victims of a universe that has "snapped" like a rubber band..... I guess it could be a good fantasy book, but I have strong objections when the label "SCIENCE FICTION" is applied to a work which is ultimately unscientific in its attitude and stance... I was deeply disappointed.

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Summary: Greg Bear's best book
Review: This is a very well done sci-fi book, with a fast paced narrative that never lets down. It only falls short of a masterpiece due to lack in character development and some superficiality in the plot. The ending reminded a little bit of Clarke's Childhood's End.

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Summary: Fantastic Book
Review: This is a terrific book! The premise, as scary as it may seem, is becoming more and more of a viable reality. Greg Bear knows his subject and handles if deftly and I, as a reader, am not lost under heavy layers of technical explanations.

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Summary: Couldn't put it down.......
Review: This is the first Greg Bear book that I read, and I was hooked almost from page 1. This is a book that you shouldn't start if you have to go to work the following day, as you will be up late finishing the book. If that isn't bad enough, once you finish the book, you can't get your mind to shut off and go to sleep. This was one of the most entertaining books I have read, my only regrets is that the following day at work on only a couple of hours sleep was not very enjoyable.

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Summary: Bear turns blood into musical prose.
Review: As with most things Greg Bear does, he is mysterious. Blood Music is not a stunning story as much for its reality, as for its likeness to the possible. That's what makes Greg Bear great. Its the possiblity of his creations, not their deniability. To read about a stunning micro-cosm is the end of the literary journey, not the begining

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Summary: Best hard-SF novel of last 10 years
Review: This is the book that opened up the career of Greg Bear, who later wrote such classics as Queen of Angels, Songs of Earth and Power, and Eon. Blood Music is the story of of a brilliant but troubled and careless scientist named Vergil Ulam, who accidentally creates cells capable of high-speed learning and intelligent growth. The cells teach themselves to evolve and remember, and adapt their environment. They are an intelligent species, and Vergil loves them, calling them noocytes. Until his work is uncovered and shut down. Knowing the immeasurable value of, and acting on personal love for, his cells, he injects them into his own bloodstream, with the hope of being re-hired elsewhere, where they can be removed and studied. Before he can, hovever, Vergil starts to slowly change. His eyesight, health, and even sex life improves. Then his body starts to change. The noocytes have studied and begun adapting their host's body. And they have learned of the outside world. In a matter of weeks, an intelligent plague sweeps across North America, entering and assimilating humanity, changing the very landscape, terraforming the body and all living things around it into something profoundly alien and new. How do you stop an intelligent plague? But the noocytes have a plan of their own, and the Universe at its most fundamental will be affected by it. I won't tell how the story ends, although it is one the most exalting, dazzling endings to any science fiction novel I have ever read. The story itself is immensely powerful, and a chance for Bear to point out the ridiculousness of our current opinion of the body's cells, and the quality of elan(explained in the book: the body is worth, and has power equal to, ten trillion of its component parts: its cells) that supposedly rules them. As said in the introduction, "Which of our generations will come to disagree?" The point of the book: _This_ one, bucko. The short story that was the novel's basis won, quite deservedly, the Hugo Award for Best Science Fiction Short Story of the Year. As always, Greg Bear's characterizations, especially of Vergil Ulam, are moving and haunting, showing the human side of the next step of Man. The premise of the story is a stimulating, fascinating one, the writing is elegant, the character's shine, and the science is indefagitable. But the premise of the story is one that immediately wounds character continuity; the story leaps from well-writeen character to well-written character, but there is no feeling of the interconnectedess of their individual situations, although the epic weight of what is occurring is continuously palpable. The story is told from the character's-eye-view except at the very beginning and end, and so, can seem to jump and start occasionally, but the beauty of Blood Music, and the essential triumph of the spirit that ends it, is no less poignant and exalting because of that. MY OVERALL SUMMARY:This is the best hard-SF novel of the last 10 years. The premise is fascinating and legitimate, the writing polished, the characters moving. Some scenes lend themselves to special effects that would be absolutely thrilling on the big screen, the story carries all the poignancy of a plague-type story such as Outbreak. It asks very fundamental questions of what we see as reality. If Kubrick makes one more SF film, it had better be this one. READ BLOOD MUSIC

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Summary: Another great.
Review: Showing his versatility in all fields of science, Bear jumps headlong into a biological nightmare. While doing research into inteligent cells, Vergil Ulam accidentaly creates something to rival The Blob. An inteligent plague sweeps America, and threatens the world. What can stop a cell that thinks