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Title: Blood Music by Greg Bear ISBN: 0-7434-4496-5 Publisher: I Books Pub. Date: 01 June, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.1 (51 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Exhilarating Adrenaline Rush & Great Speculative Fiction!
Comment: Looking for a book so good you drop everything else and get behind on all that stuff you should be doing? This is one of those books!
This had the same derail-my-other-projects distraction factor as King's "The Stand," Case's "The Genesis Code," Preston's "The Hot Zone," and assorted other favorite thrillers. Reading "Blood Music" felt like a ride on a really fast train. Even when I had a good idea of where we were going, the ride there was exhilarating.
"Blood Music" is also a great piece of speculative fiction. Lovers of hard SF will appreciate the solid science foundation. People who don't care about hard SF for its own sake will find "Blood Music" all the more creepy because it is oh-so-believable.
Greg Bear is excellent. If you have not read him, this is a great start. If you like him and missed this, buy it now. If you wait, you'll be sorry you did when you finally get around to reading "Blood Music."
If you read this and would like more Greg Bear, try "The Forge of God."
For more plague fiction by someone you may not have read, try Connie Willis's "The Domesday Book."
Rating: 5
Summary: Compelling and throughly enjoyable
Comment: I first read this book as a disillusioned teenager and it restored my faith in SF. I have just re read Blood Music for the third time and it has lost none of its potency. If anything it was more enjoyable reading it 8 years later with the weight of experience giving the story even greater depth and texture. Greg bear has the intensity of William Gibson (without the nihilism) the technical savvy of Larry Niven and the world Building skills of Robert Forward. My only regret would be that it is too short and a little thin on characterization (lessons learned in Songs of Earth and Power could be well applied here) To the reader from PA who found the story too "fantastic" I would urge you to considder the full implications of Heisenbergs Uncertainty Principal. Observation does indeed have a tangible effect on reality. There is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in your philosophies. A critical mind is a good thing to have and nurture but don't allow it to blind you to the fantastic :)
Rating: 2
Summary: A disappointment
Comment: I'm always on the look out for great SF books, and I decided to try this one after hearing how this was a classic SF novel. Well, if you are like me and interested in thought-provoking reading (and also need a good story to carry it) than I would not recommend reading this book.
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.
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Title: Darwin's Radio : In the next stage of evolution, humans are history... by Greg Bear ISBN: 0345435249 Publisher: Ballantine Books Pub. Date: 05 July, 2000 List Price(USD): $7.50 |
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Title: Darwin's Children by Greg Bear ISBN: 0345448359 Publisher: Del Rey Pub. Date: 01 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Moving Mars : A Novel by Greg Bear ISBN: 0812524802 Publisher: Tor Science Fiction Pub. Date: 15 December, 1994 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
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Title: Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan ISBN: 0345457684 Publisher: Del Rey Pub. Date: 04 March, 2003 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Humans by Robert J. Sawyer ISBN: 0765346753 Publisher: Tor Books Pub. Date: 15 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
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