Rating: 
Summary: Hardly as original as Blood Music
Review: And the micros are psychologically too much like people. But it does raise a number of interesting points, and it's a fun read. And I wanted to give it 3 stars, but Amazon is insisting on two.
Rating:
Summary: Hard to follow rewrite of Greg Bear's "Blood Music"
Review: BRAIN PLAGUE is adroitly written with all manner of biological and technological know-how, but much of the plot depends on keeping track of the nanobot colonies that reside in the humans. The main character is an artist and she takes on nanos to help her with her art (I think). Vampires and arsenic junkies abound in a hugely corrupt techno-culture . . . and all semblence of a plot vanishes about one-third the way through the book. Part of the problem is that it's hard to sympathize with the trials of a visual artist when (the author's use of) language simply fails to convey the uniqueness of the main character's art. That said, it's just as hard to imagine the intelligence of molecule-sized nanobots in Chry's head. They think, speak and emote exactly like humans, but humans are what they are because their brains are made up of densely-packed molecules, billions upon billions of them. I just couldn't buy this conceit. The plot is trivial--and in places makes no sense whatsoever. You can have more fun with Greg Bear's much more original story, "Blood Music".
Rating: 
Summary: Powerful, lyrical story about technology, art, & being human
Review: Brilliant, powerful, beautiful -- at times terrifying, at times humourous -- with finely developed characters from the human protagonist to the generations of microbial creatures developing in her brain. The story is deep without being pretentious, fast-paced and thrilling but with an attention to detail. I picked this up, of all places, in a supermarket, because the cover caught my eye. I have not read any of this author's previous work, but I'm looking forward to reading anything else available. It's been a long time since a story captured my imagination so completely that I would give up a night's sleep to read it through to the end. Dawn is nearly here, I've turned the last page, and my very first thought was to write a review.The protagonist, Chrysoberyl, is an artist who creates moving sculptures of light, and the author paints each creation in vivid description. The story deftly moves the reader from the infinitesimal world in Chrys' mind, through the various environments of the "outside" world, through art galleries and slums and mansions and soup kitchens and nightclubs. Chrys' story plays out in a relatively short space of time, while that of the microbes she interacts with spans hundreds of their generations. In contrast, in the outside world there are humans, unlike Chrys, whose lifespans are centuries long. All the varying cultures maintain a faltering balance, threatened by the "brain plague" of uncontrolled nano-infestation, the victims of which are scorned as "vampires." When Chrys volunteers to become host to a presumable benign colony, she finds herself at the thin line between "carrier" and "vampire." Cybertech is not my usual reading choice, because it often feels impersonal to me, more about ideas than humanity, but this story is as human as it gets, examining the impulses that make us creative, loving, hate-filled, loyal, worshipful, petty, just.The integration of human brain with this sort of nanotechnology is rushing toward us ever more quickly -- with its advantages and disadvantages, its benefits and threat of brain plagues. It may be a long time before every facet of our livesisare ruled by nanotechnology, but this book gives us a glimpse of what we might hope or fear to become, and a solid story, as well.
Rating:
Summary: How'd Ya Like to Be God?
Review: Ever lonely? Want to feel needed? Like being looked up to? You could buy a cat....Or how about your very own civilization to share your skull with you and revere you as the bringer of light and divine judgement? Think being a microcosm is easy? Read the Bible sometimes. Humans are notorious for hubris, and the sentients living in Chrysoberyl's head are not all that different. With double agents, pacifists, anarchists, radicals, fundamentalists and even a microscopic version of Timothy Leary preaching that the true way to enlightenment as a dopamine-induced state of bliss. True, they're geniuses, but are they worth the trouble? What if you forget to feed them? Well, at least you don't have to scoop a litterbox. Definitely an excellent read; if you like the "thought experiment" style of "A Door into Ocean" you will love this one.
Rating:
Summary: How'd Ya Like to Be God?
Review: Ever lonely? Want to feel needed? Like being looked up to? You could buy a cat....Or how about your very own civilization to share your skull with you and revere you as the bringer of light and divine judgement? Think being a microcosm is easy? Read the Bible sometimes. Humans are notorious for hubris, and the sentients living in Chrysoberyl's head are not all that different. With double agents, pacifists, anarchists, radicals, fundamentalists and even a microscopic version of Timothy Leary preaching that the true way to enlightenment as a dopamine-induced state of bliss. True, they're geniuses, but are they worth the trouble? What if you forget to feed them? Well, at least you don't have to scoop a litterbox. Definitely an excellent read; if you like the "thought experiment" style of "A Door into Ocean" you will love this one.
Rating: 
Summary: Fascinating concept, with a bit of a nit
Review: I loved the idea, and I loved the libertine Eleutherian community and their nightclubs. Now the microbes experience an entire lifetime in the equivalent of human weeks. Hence my nits. Chrys, God of Mercy, experiences conversation with her various people in her 'real time', yet, so apparantly do the Eleutherians. Shouldn't a conversation be taking place over a span of Eleutherian days? Or weeks? She closes her eyes for 2 minutes to punish people with an eclipse lasting months(?). Yet she sleeps, waking every 2 hours so her people won't start misbehaving - Is that not the equivalent of decades 'without the sun'?
Rating:
Summary: Great Book!
Review: I really love the idea of a symbiotic relationship with a civilization of microscopic organisms. The book explored this complex topic without becoming more technical than any average reader can understand. I liked the universe the author had set up so much that I read all the other books part of the Elysium universe, and they were just as great as this one. The realistic element of still having corruption, violence, and abuse in society made the story seem more life-like rather than having it as a perfect future where society is self-sufficient and without crime. This book had everything I could want in a science fiction novel: adventure, conflict, character development & interaction, as well as that undefineable element of a good story that won't let you put the book down until you're done reading it. I highly recommend this and other books by this author to any Science Fiction fan.
Rating:
Summary: Listening to your inner micropeople -- or should you?
Review: In "The Children Star", the preceding novel of this series, intelligent microbes were the solution to a mystery. Here they are the point of departure for an "alien relations" story like no other. We've met all kinds of aliens in science fiction: implacable aliens that wanted only to eat us up, benevolent aliens welcoming us to an advanced galactic civilization, and all manner of dispositions in between. There have been parasites that snatched human bodies, and occasional symbiotes that provided free medical coverage. Joan Slonczewski, with her longtime concern for social and bioethical problems, and her heartfelt championship of universal rights, has cooked up a breed of aliens that maximally perplex both conscience and prudence. These microbes, you see, are not just intelligent. They are also social, in the way that humans are social (not bees). Individuals retain enough individuality to have clashing wishes and clashing ideologies. So microbial societies develop distinct cultures -- as variegated as human societies. Add to this that they live and die radically faster than humans. For good measure, on their home planet they evolved to colonize non-sentient animals of approximately human scale. So on invading human hosts, their initial impulse is to control these hosts as they would control mindless beasts. In "The Children Star", humans almost decided to wipe them out, but relented because the colonies in some humans developed more symbiotic cultures, with dazzling services to offer. Now they've been around a while, and human society is caught in a maelstrom. Virulent microbial societies have become a "brain plague", controlling their environments -- their hosts -- in short-sighted, destructive ways. A secret community of carriers, however, has learned to pass around microbes with friendlier or more submissive cultures. Living as fast as they do, the microbes also think faster, and confer great benefits as brain enhancers. Besides which, they're company to the lonely human soul, and some worship their hosts as "gods". It's a dangerous game, however. Generations of microbes parade by in what for humans is a short while. New generations bring new fashions and ideas. A human carrier can wake in the morning to find that overnight there has been a revolution. Now the microbes are bad. That's all I'll say about plot, though there's plenty more. What about plausibility? The one and only attempt to make "micropeople" plausible occurs early on, when the protagonist of the story objects, "It's absurd. Nothing that small can have enough ... connections to be self-aware." The doctor answers, "Self-awareness occurs in sentients with about a trillion logic gates. A micro cell contains about ten times that number of molecular gates." Gating what, though, and how? Electrical signals? Connections in humans take place at synapses, where electrical signals are transmitted by chemical packets that take about 15 milliseconds to cross the gap. What sorts of pathways are available inside a microbe, and what timings are possible at the connections? Where signals have to be summed, what would be the thresholds and rise times? These timings could set a limit to the speed of thinking. The story has to attribute fast thinking to the micropeople, because microbial lives would otherwise be too short to learn much. Assuming no questions of this sort pose a "showstopper", I think that the micropeople of "The Children Star" and "Brain Plague" raise a new science fiction topic as fundamental as space travel. After all, there could be "macropeople" as well. James Lovelock, when he first put forth the "Gaia" hypothesis, was careful to disavow any implication that "Gaia" was conscious; his speculation was only about an autonomic control system. (Later he wavered and personalized it a little.) Similarly, Richard Dawkins has been careful to declare that "The Selfish Gene" is only a metaphor. But why shouldn't there be sentient entities at more than one scale, operating at more than one pace? How would we ever discover if there were? How to communicate? And what would be the consequences for the discussion of evolution, if microbial entities were found to be conscious players? This could be big.
Rating:
Summary: Slonczewski, An Author to Watch!
Review: Joan Slonczewski is one the latest good science fiction authors to hit the scene. I count three other novels in this series, A Door Into Ocean, Daughter of Elysium, and The Children Star, making this the fourth. All these novels revolve around one universe, but in each one she explores deeper into the notion of otherness and alien intelligence. Her first novel, A Door Into Ocean, tells the story of a race of humans who live in harmony with nature on rafts in the ocean and humans who live very extended lives in technologically advanced floating cities on the same world. Daughter of Elysium tells of the awakening of artifical intelligence within those cities. The Children Star recounts the discovery of a microscopic intelligence. Brain Plague goes further into the exploration of micro-intelligence and how they can live with humans. It is a good novel and keeps you off balance. However, I felt as though something was lacking in this last novel. Maybe it was just the lack of connection I felt with the main character, an artist.
Rating:
Summary: hey..this book is funny too.
Review: Just wanted to mention that Brain Plague is also very amusing. Chrys's microbes often just wanna have fun & cause no end of ruckus partying up in her brain, setting up night clubs, discovering that they can imbibe alcohol etc. It's really great to have a SCI-FI novel that can combine serious themes with a leavening of humor.
|
