Rating: 
Summary: A disappointment
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: 
Summary: Bear hates women?
Review: You're never quite sure where Bear is trying to go with Blood Music. It starts off as your standard geek loner scientist who can't get a date creates a "plague" that will make him God. Reminds me a touch of Herbert's White Plague with some Spider Man thrown in. Bear is famous for his "hard" sci fi and he ends up writing a pretty good, believable template for every super hero creation back story, from Spider Man to the Hulk. About a 1/3 the way through the book branches off into your standard deadly plague/survivalist story. Parts of it read a lot like William Heine's "The Last Canadian" (1977). Then it branches into some metaphysical tripe about existence and whether the universe guides the mind's perception and development or if the mind guides the universe's development. And then it's all over in a blink. And you're left wondering, wtf happened?
Written in the mid'80s before the fall of the Berlin wall and the WTC, the book has a certain dated feeling but that's a minor quibble. The genetic stuff you'd swear Bear wrote it yesterday and that's a plus. My only major quibble, besides the odd, abrupt, stupid ending is Bear really sucks at writing women characters. All his female characters are either stupid or bitchy. Oddly too he spends a lot of time dealing with the virus creator's mother, making her the folksy overly critical moral center. She survives the plague but then she drops out of the story and we have no idea of her fate.
Not bad bit of sci fi but I sure hope in the intervening decade Bear has learned to write better women characters and dumped his textually apparent belief their either stupid or bitchy.
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