Vitals

Rating:
Summary: Not up to his usual standards
Review: I love Greg Bear's books. I've read each one, at least twice. Darwins Radio made me sit and think for a long time, then I had to read it again. I am extraordinarily disappointed in Vitals though. It was all I could do to get through the book. The book is darker than any of his other books (Blood Music included) with a muddled protagonist and almost one dimensional characters. The idea of the book is intriguing, but the execution is poor and the end just happens. It seems like the end of the book is an afterthought, almost as if he had written enough and had to wrap it up in 5 pages. Too bad since it could have been great. One book won't make me give up on his writing, since the rest has been so good, but I do hope his next book will be back to his usual.

Rating:
Summary: An absolute disappointment
Review: Vitals is little more than an undergraduate biology research paper on bacterial evolution, peppered with an incomplete story stretched paper-thin over 330 pages. The Epilogue reads like a work-in-progress plotting tool: a timeline of events and a litany of questions Bear has, for some reason, decided to leave unanswered.

There's too much good reading out there to waste time on this.

Rating:
Summary: Spooky Stuff
Review: Secret conspiracies, plot twists and evil scientists. What more could you ask for? A couple of days after reading it, I had to go back and re-read bits of it, just to make sure I understood what was going on. There are a lot of wait-a-minute moments, where everything you've assumed up to that point gets yanked out from under you. A word of warning, though: If you like stories with a nice, neat, happily-ever-after ending, you'll probably have a problem with this book.

Rating:
Summary: There And Back Again
Review: On the cover of this book it says, "living forever is to die for". Whether or not the statement rings true for anyone, it is, if nothing else, an extremely tired, and trite phrase that is more fitting for the tenth sequel of a slasher film. Greg Bear is a better author than this book, "Vitals". If an author is going to take one of the oldest and well-worn themes, in this case immortality, he or she best have a startlingly new approach. This story does not offer a new perspective and its primary premise is made all the more tiresome by tying it to villains that are among the top two 20th century historical groups that are used when a grand conspiracy is to be invoked.

The evil source for this book's villains has been used a multitude of times, and even the harm that is spread, is, at best a variation on a theme. The author casts the crime over so many victims it is impossible to suspend disbelief, and far too many people that would normally be of some importance, like The US President or the heads of a variety of agencies that are rather important to this country's well being, are dealt with in a sentence or two as if they were afterthoughts.

The author did provide some novel ideas that could have spawned several books. Instead they are all crammed into this one work that does a poor job of educating the reader to complex biological topics, while expecting the same reader to follow a plot of dozens and dozens of characters, with a more leisurely pace set for the description of what the female characters are wearing.

There are also some comments that seem to have just dropped randomly on a page with very little context. What could have been a searing comment about a recent election falls flat, when it should have been quite clever. Even when whatever action pauses and there is dialogue that discusses the morality of the issues at hand, the topic never gets above the most basic of worn concepts. I also think there should be a new law that does not allow writers to place all billionaires in thinly disguised versions of Bill Gates' home. Finally, I do not need to be told a dozen times the brand of cellular phone our hero uses, or the brand of coffee he drinks. Tell me once endorse products somewhere else.

Rating:
Summary: A very sorry reader tunrs thumbs down
Review: I was a sorry reader when I got done this thing -- Bear's done better, but this feels like his agent gave him an outline to fill in, or he wrote it in a few weeks just to get through a contracted book. The coincidence factor was so high, and the characters -- particularly the women -- so bad, that I gave my copy to a library booksale. Want a good book -- try Hellspark by Janet Kagan.

Rating:
Summary: Bear's stab at mainstream (no spoilers)
Review: It's good to see Bear, who is an excellent writer, get the attention he deserves - Darwin's Radio clearly help break him out of the slum of SF. But with Vitals reads like something that has been 'agented' to death: he makes too many concessions to the needs of mainstream, Crighton-type techno thrillers, and ends up sacrificing the tight intelligence that makes his other novels so fascinating. Perhaps he meant to take out the tired old conspiracy horse and give it a new saddle, but after an interesting opening, the book lets genre take the reigns, and only intermittantly breaks convention with anything truly thought provoking. And given the base of the novel (the frightening depth to which bacteria and mitochondria control our lives), I couldn't help but be frustrated that such ideas were glossed over in favor of pedestrian execution. Bear has suffered similar lapses in his career, so this doesn't really tarnish his rep with me, but I do recommend that folks who've never read his work stay away from Vitals... Instead, pick up Darwin's Radio, Moving Mars, Queen of Angels, or the similarly-themed Blood Music; then you'll really see what people are talking about.

Rating:
Summary: Tom Clancy meets Kafka/Orwell - without the insight
Review: Bleak. Depressing.

Vitals starts out in the techno-thriller genre, Tom Clancy with an X-Files twist. It turns into a bit of a mystery, then becomes increasingly hallucinogenic. The spirit of Orwell is invoked, but Bear doesn't give us Orwell's social insight. The end result is Steven King on downers.

Then there's Greg Bear's view of women in this novel. It's incidentally mysogynistic; though one could argue Bear feels equal opportunity despair.

There are some interesting ideas, but Bear's biology is not the equal of his physics. (The melange of villains vying to wreak havoc upon the soon-to-be shattered civilizations may include a emergent planetary bacterial intellect -- Gaia done darkly.)

Unless you feel a deep need for pointless despair, skip this book.

Rating:
Summary: The Rule of Paranoia
Review: This could have an exciting, gripping techno-thriller. This could have been a deep examination into the hows, whys, and moral correctness of immortality. This could have been a strong expose of how cutting edge research into 'fringe' areas of science is funded and the influence such funding has on the results and how they are used. Unfortunately, we get none of these.

At the start, we find Hal Cousins on a deep bathyscaph dive to try and collect specimens of truly primitive bacteria that he thinks hold the key to the biological 'clock' that seems to control aging in all higher lifeforms. During the dive, the bathyscaph's driver, for no apparent reason, attacks Hal, and later, after surfacing, commits apparent suicide by jumping into a very cold sea. This whole scene does nothing but confuse the reader, as at this early stage of the book, none of the characters have been developed enough to allow the reader to see that the behavior of both people on the sub is slowly becoming aberrant and psychotic. I was very close to closing up the book at this point and putting it on the shelf as not worth reading. Given what followed, this impulse should have been followed.

From the initial reasonable scientific premise that Bear starts with, the plot continues to thicken with impossible conspiracies, improbable connections to biological research done in 1930's Russia, paranoid and schizophrenic characters, and sudden jumps in the later stages of the book to new characters who are there apparently only to help further confuse the plot, rather than any rational development of the original idea. True character development is almost nil and the actions of the fairly large cast often seem to have no logical basis. Some characters are introduced and then almost immediately dropped, leading to just another stubbed off plot thread.

This book either needed a lot more pages to fully develop all the plot threads and characters, or the entire focus of the book needed to be narrowed down to a single set of ideas that were consistently developed. As it is, we have a mish-mash of partially developed plot lines and thematic ideas, none of which are fully satisfying or resolved, which Bear effectively admits with his closing round-up of questions that the book has not answered. This one is far from Bear's best.

Rating:
Summary: Global Techno Mystery Gone Flat
Review: It's hard to say what's good about this book without writing a spoiler. Suffice it to say there is a loner-type scientist, who happens to be working on a cure for aging, and happens to have a twin brother that happens to be working on the same thing. The twin brother dies, and Dr. Hal Cousins spends the rest of the story trying to uncover the global conspiracy that is trying to stop him and murdered his brother.

This isn't anything that many bestseller authors like John Le Carre, Tom Clancy, and others have served up for years. Greg Bear makes it into a technothriller, with an interesting theory about bacteria and how they "communicate" with each other.

Although the characters seem a little underdeveloped, they depth they attain is not out of line for this type of novel. Even though you learn a fair amount of his history, there is not a lot for the reader to hang onto with regard to Hal. Then again, there isn't supposed to be. Nobody gets close to him and his quest is for one man only, aside from an interlude with his brother's widow. You are supposed to hang on to the mystery and the action, and for the most part Vitals is vital that way.

Side note: I used to live a few blocks in Berkeley where some of the action in this story takes place. That made it sort of fun for me, but not for the average reader.

Greg Bear has become an important enough author to make it worthwhile to read this book, even if it doen't become one of your favorites.

Rating:
Summary: He can do much better...unpleasant, to say the least
Review: Drenched in anti-Semitic paranoia, this book is a surprise from an obviously talented author. I have always admired Mr. Bear as an author who dared to state a Big Science Idea and make it scientifically plausible, even if his characterizations were a bit two-dimensional. Darwin's Radio included a valiant attempt to bring in modern molecular biology into Sci-Fi, much better than the typical plague/outbreak/hotzone thriller. "Vitals" starts out promisingly, venturing into the fields of extremeophile research and life prolongation; both of which contain "accessible" science suitable for Sci-Fi exploitation. But it quickly veers into gratuitous violence, predictable sex, excessive use of the "f" word and it's cousins, and a difficult-to-interpret but consistent discussion of anti-Semitism. Granted, the book is so confusing, the anti-Semitic stuff maybe "historical", but the theme is front and center. Even bypassing that issue, the book reads like a fast attempt at a thriller screenplay, almost as low as Dean R. Koontz. Mr. Bear has flown so high....let us hope this is a one-time problem.