Blood Music

Blood Music starts off with a promising concept and treats
it in a relatively sophisticated manner. Through the use of
recombinant DNA research, Vergil Ulam, creates a sentient single
cell organism. These organisms subsequently begin to build a
society to fit their needs. This means changing the molecular
structure of living creatures, including human beings, to suit
them. Thus begins (and ends) Blood Music.

The better aspects of Blood Music involve the exploration of
the possibility of intelligent single-cell organisms. The scenes
where organisms actually "talk" or communicate with Vergil and
later Bernard had great potential. Unfortunately, most of the
novel reads like a second rate horror flick. I have not read the
novelette that won a Hugo so I suspect the more carelessly
conceived aspects of the novel were left out. The "blob" that
takes over New York city and the "ghosts" that appear to convince
Suzy to "join" them are simply trite B-movie devices.

It's hard to recommend reading the entire novel. Only the
first third and second third are worth the effort.

The main plot is
1. scientist discovers plague
2. plague takes over America
3. plague is actually next evolution for human species

Now I believe pretty much anyone can write an end-of-the-world novel and make it at least somewhat compelling, and surely this book is an acceptable page turner. But there are several problems with Blood Music that left me disappointed.

First, the initial discovery and explanation of the noocytes (individual cells that are intelligent) is poorly done. Bear does a hack job of really explaining this at a biological level and I was never convinced.

Second, the idea of an intelligent plague is an intriguing one, but is has been used for a better end in other books, most notably Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card. Bear never really builds up the ethical dilemma of what does it mean if we eradicate this disease.

Third, any end-of-the-world novel is going to need to seem epic in nature. The Stand by Stephen King is I think a great example. You really need more character's viewpoints to get the whole picture. Instead, we are given about five characters to follow. This leads to another problem:

Fourth, the characters are very poorly done. Virgil, Edward, Bernard - all three are pretty much interchangable as they go through their plague symptoms. Bear uses a lot of strange syntax to show their mental states, but it is confusing to read. Also, for some reason his plague survivors are all mentally deficient, so we have to follow characters around that don't really provide any thought-provoking moments.

Fifth, I was irked by the poor editing of this book. It seems to be at a high school level. Besides the numerous typos, there are many examples where someone is talking and it is not at all clear who it is. The whole book really stands out to me as a low class effort by both author and editor. It is originally from 1985, but maybe it should have been re-edited for the 2000 edition.

Finally, we have this whole idea of the plague really being a next evolution of humanity. This is fine. But by the end we never really resolve anything. What exactly is the next evolution beyond the noocytes? Bear dissolves into this pseudo-sciency mumbo jumbo and as far as I can tell all humans join this sphere that flies off into space. Hmmm. He could have asked a lot more interesting questions with his premise along the way. For example, if human personalities are integrated into the plague, can new personalities appear or will no new humans ever be born? He skims over some other interesting points - what about evil humans that join the utopian-like plague, is there a point to the plague to actually accomplish anything?

Overall Bear is playing with some grand ideas, but many authors have taken these same ideas to greater heights. When you write a book of this low quality and have bad characters, it is hard to pull off that epic and transcendent experience that he seems to be going for at the end. So my advice to you is look elsewehere for a good SF book. Here are three related recommendations, Contact by Carl Sagan, Speaker for the Dead - OSC, and The Stand - by Stephen King.

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.

The first third to half of this felt like you were sitting in a taut, well made thriller film. Virgil is a classic tool to set up an action/slight SF plot - a gifted geneticist, socially inept, is caught out doing shonky private research on the company time, and in a classy scene told he has two hours to destroy all his stuff. He manages to hide the most crucial enhanced 'learning' cells he's been working on, but eventually can only smuggle them out by injecting them in his own body - a crazy act, but he can't bear the thought of losing years of successful research. The stuff will probably die anyway, although of course it shouldn't have been let out of carefully quarantined conditions. All this presented skilfully, with the pseudo-scientific dialogue (how would I know) not abusing your suspension of disbelief.

Of course weird things start happening, and he calls on his friend (and seeming ideal hero vehicle), Edward, a Doctor and Harrison Ford style intelligent and resourceful (but still sort of everyman) figure. Has Virgil potentially unleashed a deadly virus? And who are these suspicious CIA types in the background - there was actually defence research secretly happening at Virgil's lab: are we squaring off for a standard little man against the establishment, using his wits to unravel the mystery while on the run, finally using whatever the discovery is to cleverly resolve the book? There's even a powerful potential mini-resolution relatively early on that Bear could have built up to as a satisfactory conclusion.

I would have enjoyed that, and I'm pretty sure he could have pulled it off nicely.

But the novel veers. First into, 'Oh, ok, he's sliding into Spiderman territory: the microbes in Virgil's body are reconstructing him, making him invulnerable to disease, attractive to women, and giving him superhuman powers.' Again, not what I was expecting, but, sure, lets run with it.

But then the novel careers. We've got a plague on our hands - that casually wipes out North America in a couple of days. We're now in a holocaust novel following around a few anomalous survivors. Meanwhile, over in Europe, a researcher has bravely taken his infection to an isolation tank so he can be studied as he dies. He starts communicating with the cells within him - they are intelligent and myriad.

The scope just keeps growing - now the cells are challenging our view of humanity: they're more like an alien species with Godlike powers. It's an odyssey, with basic questions about reality and life and identity.

Quite a ride - a writer who could put out a very decent thriller who is an SF thinker at heart - he keeps on throwing in new, 'Yeah, but what if's' along the way, any one or two of which would probably sustain a whole other book for someone else. We do lose out a bit on character, perhaps, because of this, but the people are not gallingly one dimensional, and are enjoyable as the sort of larger than life people you'd expect to meet in a decently cast slick film. Somehow, while not being as tight as it could have been, the book manages to cohere while wildly changing direction.