An excellent idea sadly marred by poor writing, the impression is that Greg Bear came up with a great idea for a novel, researched it and then decided to tell everyone look at what I have learned. The main problem is the there is a distinct clumpiness to the story a few pages of story followed by look at what I learned today, a rushed ending just as the book begins to take shape.It borderlines on being turgid. If we look at Andy Weir's The Martian, which is undeniably a well written novel, it co...

Frighteningly dull. Perhaps the most pointless succession of words ever committed to the page.The blurb at the back of the book, the concept is quite interesting. Unfortunately, this is it in terms of plot. All of this detail is established around page 50 or so.What happens in the monstrous, monstrous morass that follows? Absolutely fuc*ing nothing.Allegedly, this is a story about a pandemic. In it, the characters sit in meeting rooms talking about things in broad concepts. Reading it is like si...

The first time I read this I felt horrified and dazed for weeks. I still consider this a masterpiece of horror/sci-fi. The characters are somewhat memorable, but more memorable is their pain; indeed, the pain of the whole world was felt in the back of my mouth, preparing it rise up from my stomach, up the pipe, out the maw, to hang onto my lip and smack me thrice on my face, wink, and then jump off to slither under the door-jam and horrify someone else.Don't get me wrong, this is a pure sci-fi n...

Maybe this book and I got off to a bad start. I had no idea what it was about, and when I started reading about this guy stuck in a frozen land and none of the names were recognizable I thought the guy was on a distant planet that was mostly frozen. Then there started to be some kind of semi-related creatures discovered, and I thought they must be aliens, and was Darwin’s Radio something broadcasting through space? Then it finally became clear this was all taking place on Earth and everyone invo...

Let's hark back to the halcyon early 2000s, when Bill Cosby might have starred in a PSA about a disease outbreak intended to calm the frightened public, when the scientific community might have accepted that an ancient virus was the evolutionary catalyst for Homo sapiens to subspeciate from Homo neanderthalensis in one generation, before we got a better handle on how screwed up the hominid family tree really is.I read the sequel Darwin's Children about a decade ago and only recently realized I c...

I really liked this book. The author obviously researched the subject matter thoroughly, and there was a good balance of science and engaging plot line. I found it to be an easy and fun read, and I will definitely be reading more books by this author in the future.

Maybe it's just because I'm an evolutionary biologist, but this book stretched my suspension of disbelief to the breaking point. When something unbelievable happens in a science-fiction book, the author can take one of two approaches: either quickly handwave it with technobabble and move on to focus on the consequences of the event, or foreground the explanation based on reasonable extrapolations of current science. The author tried to do the latter, but his "explanation" made all the sense of a...

A re-read for the Powell's SF Book Group in Exile. I got to this book a little later than I planned, so had to push the reading speed. And at first that was a challenge. It is definitely hard science fiction. But I've read a bunch of genetics, dna, anthropology and was able to muscle through - so this ended up being a 2 day read - well 36 hours.Writing near-future hard science fiction that ages well is probably impossible. There's almost no way to get the science right. And for something like th...

This book was quite a mixed bag. It’s very hard science. There’s also a lot of politics. And it reads like a best seller science thriller, almost like a cross between Michael Crichton and James Patterson. I didn’t care for the first three hundred fifty pages. There were several times I wanted to put the book down, but I was reading this for my book club in exile, so I plowed through. Fortunately, the last hundred fifty pages were much better. There was less science and more thriller. And I final...

I did not enjoy this book in the slightest. I probably should have seen it coming, what with the very first sentence of the very first chapter likening the color of the sky backdrop of the alps to 'a dog's pale crazy eye'. Even when, on the very next page, Bear described a frozen waterfall as 'a gnome's upside-down castle' I thought oh, this won't be so bad.I was wrong. Dead wrong.First, let's talk about geek talk. I'm a big fan of Michael Crichton, and as such I expect a book's geek talk to be

I liked it. I started it as an audiobook for a long weekend drive up to Eugene and I liked it enough to check out the book and finish reading it once I got back-I thought about finishing it through the cds but that would have taken too long and I HAD to know what would happen. It's really like two books in one. The first part has lots of science and a slower pace, then the book starts to go down an entirely different and unexpected path, raising some interesting ethical issues along the way. The...

An interesting look at what might possibly be the next stage of evolution. Greg Bear's Hugo nominee is a wonderful mix of scientific and political thriller as well as a study of human reactions and relationships. Beautifully laid out and written in an interesting manner.After I finished this book I sat back and thought, my god, I know all about viruses and diseases and retroviruses now. Greg Bear does not dumb down the science to make sure his audience gets it, instead he explains everything sev...

A CDC disease chaser discovers a virus that seems to be asymptomatic in everyone but pregnant women, and mass graves in Georgia (the country) and a newly discovered family of forty thousand year old mummies suggest this isn’t the first outbreak. And our heroes -- that CDC disease hound, a successful biologist, and an anthropologist with questionable ethics -- begin to suspect it isn’t an outbreak at all.Okay, so it’s not actually a ‘read a textbook instead’ science fiction book. I mean, the scie...

As warned by a friend, the ideas here are pretty fascinating -- the book might be fifteen years behind in terms of science, but there's nothing inherently ridiculous about the idea based on the scientific knowledge of the time -- but the actual narrative is pretty deadly boring. Some of the writing is just... why would you let that slip past, editor? Hard SF isn't just about the cool ideas: there has to be some element of execution there as well, or there's no point in writing it as a novel -- t...

The first 200 pages or so of this book are incredibly engaging and interesting. I wasn't put off by the science talk, though there was too much of it -someone who truly understood it would probably find a lot of holes in it, and someone who didn't get it beyond the basics didn't really need to read so extensively about it- but after the first half, the book starts taking a plunge south. I stopped caring about the characters at some point in the middle, the female lead turning into quite a trope

Actually 3.5, were that possible on GoodReads.I really enjoy science fiction with lots of science, and especially evolutionary concepts, so this book appealed to me immensely in theory. In practice, I found myself skipping huge amounts of text so I could move the plot along. The science behind the concept was intriguing and well developed, but the rest of the story dragged on longer than I thought necessary. For those who like their scifi with indepth descriptions of every character and their ev...

So I keep on reading Bear novels, feeling disappointed, waiting a while, then rinse and repeat.This time I've clarified why I am so ambivalent about this guy: he has fascinating ideas then writes dull books about them. The premise here is an extreme example. Our "junk" DNA turns out to be a collection of emergency rapid-response evolutionary accelerators - and the emergency response has just been triggered. Cue mysterious pregnancies, peculiar facial mutations and a really big scientific mystery...

3.5 stars. Excellent concept and great science highlight this very good "hard" SF story. Winner: Nebula Award for Best Science Fiction NovelNominee: Hugo Award for Best Science Fiction NovelNominee: Locus Award for Best Science Fiction NovelNominee: John W. Campbell Award for Best Science Fiction Novel

Darwin’s Radio is a pleasure for someone who loves hard science fiction, as I do. Here’s the premise: SHEVA, a retrovirus long-buried in our genes, suddenly awakens and begins to attack pregnant women, forcing them to miscarry after three months. But that’s just the beginning – after the miscarriage, these same women spontaneously become pregnant again, this time developing a fetus that’s not quite human. The federal government, led by the science establishment, after first denying the truth, th...

Fascinating hard Sci-Fi speculation on what a new state of evolution might be like. Parts of his microbiology descriptions were a bit heavy but the plot was interesting enough you could breeze through the overly complicated passages and easily stay with the story. I see there's a sequel but I'm thinking I don't feel the need to see anything else happen with this particular story.