Vitals

Rating:
Summary: Avoid!
Review: Normally, I would call myself a fan of Greg Bear; but this book is hard to recommend.

I picked up "Vitals" because I had just finished (the much better) "Darwin's Children" and thought another Bear book would be fun to read. For me, the book starts on a sour note in that it's set in the Juan de Fucha trench, and I recently read (and would highly recommend) Peter Watts' "Starfish" which is set there as well. Watts described it better, I believe.

The middle third of the book gets the technological explanations out of the way and devolves into typical thriller mode. That's where I began to worry. I wondered if Greg Bear is deliberately dumbing down his writing style in order to acquire more of the techno-thriller audience. (Apparently "Darwin's Radio" sold very well to the larger, non-SF audience, and "Vitals" is blatantly aimed at that same non-SF audience.)

But I stuck with the book, hoping that things would get wrapped up in the end. This was a mistake.

Simply put, the ending stinks. Instead of offering resolution to the reader, the protagonist actually revisits the festering plot holes to point them out and not explain them, making for one of the least satisfying book endings in recent memory.

If you're looking for a good Greg Bear book avoid this and instead read "Darwin's Radio", "Darwin's Children", or "Slant".

If you're looking for a good bio-catastrophe novel instead try "Starfish" by Peter Watts.

Rating:
Summary: Very, VERY disappointing!
Review: Not at all typical of Bear's usual work which is lucid, well-written and coherent. This book started out quite strong but seemed to lose steam toward the final third, almost as if Bear lost interest in the novel while he was writing it. It's a shame, really, since the characters have the potential to be very interesting and the premise, while farfetched (see David Cortesi's Feb 24 review for an excellent anlysis) was involving. Coincidentally, I read _Vitals_ soon after I had read Greg Iles' _Footprints of God_. The premises are similar, but the Iles book actually ends better than does Bear's (though I'm not implying Iles' ending was very good).

Rating:
Summary: Stunning Sci-Fi
Review: I suppose that I can understand some of the negativity of many of these reviews, but I certainly can't agree with it. I thought Vitals was terrific, one of the most interesting books I'd read in years. It has a lot of different qualities, but I was most reminded of Mel Gibson's movie Conspiracy Theory. In both, the protagonist isn't particularly likeable--although Bear's Hal Cousins is certainly more stable (most of the time) than Gibson's character. In both, the audience is never quite sure what is real and what isn't. Both are action filled, frightening, horrifyingly plausible, and deliver at the end. Vitals even delivers three times, with big, unexpected climaxes like a series of punches to the gut.

Now, as to the "flaws": Bear is a writer who has almost always demanded a lot of his readers. This isn't casual sci-fi, not space opera; in fact, until about two-thirds of the way through the book it's scarcely sci-fi at all. Hal Cousins, the protagonist, is thrown into a series of bizarre events and spends much of the novel scrambling desparately to make sense of an insane situation. In these passages, Bear reveals little, allowing the reader to share Cousins' confusion. Perhaps the action-orientation of these parts put off some of Bear's regular readers. After about 1/4 of the book, Bear changes point-of-view and time, and certainly I found this disorientating. Given that at this point Bear goes back in time and deals not with Hal Cousins, but with his twin brother Rob, also a scientist in the same field, confusion is understandable. Granted, everything is labelled, but I did have to look back when it became apparent to me that I'd glossed too much, and evidently I wasn't alone in this. But for me it's the only real flaw in the book, and the solution's simple--read more carefully! By the time we are back with Hal Cousins, things become extremely intense. The story takes a sci-fi twist that those readers who are more action oriented might find hard to follow. Bear has created a chilling but complex premise, and from there, everything else flows logically and with the inevitability of a Greek Tragedy, minus the deus ex machina. If you're looking for light entertainment, look elsewhere. But for a gripping, creepy and thoughtful read, you can't do better than this. I'd also recommend Maelstrom by Peter Watts as similar in tone.