Subject: Review: Darwin's Radio by Greg Bear

From: "Aaron M. Renn" <[email-masked]>
Date: 11 Oct 1999 23:17:10 -0400

Darwin's Radio, Greg Bear
	Review Copyright (c) 1999 Aaron M. Renn

Conclusion: Worth Reading

I thought some of the prose and dialog was clunky, and I had a problem
with a couple of the scientific premises of the story, but I still managed
to find this a quick and entertaining read.  The story's premise was
spectacular, and Bear does a great job of making it seem credible and even
possible.  This is a work of true hard science fiction, a subgenre that
Bear is a master of.

The plot is pretty straightforward.  Endogenous retroviruses (bits of
leftover viruses that we incorporated into our own DNA) have started
becoming active and infectious.  The viruses cause a disease nicknamed
"Herod's flu" because it causes miscarriages.  Kaye Lang is a biologist
who predicted that infectious endogenous retroviruses were possible, and
she gets swept up into the battle to understand and contain this new
infection.  But is it really a disease?  The more Lang learns, the less
sure she is.  What she suspects is really going on could change humanity
forever.

Bear buttresses his story with tons of scientific details.  Perhaps a bit
too many.  There are several times in the book where I thought I was
listening to a university lecture on biology instead of reading a novel.
You can learn some things this way, nice buzzwords if nothing else, but I
thought it interfered with the story.  Also, a lot of the characters
didn't work for me.  Particularly a few of the CDC/HIH bureaucrats seemed
like characatures of government workers.  Their dialog about hyping up
different health threats seemed a bit overdone.  But the more I thought
about it, the more I realized how probably true it was.  After all, the
Waco Massacre started out as a publicity stunt by the ATF to help it
secure more federal funding.

In a work of hard SF like this, scientific plausibility is a must.  As I
said, this book largely delivers, but there were a couple of things I had
a problem with.  First, Bear claims many times that the likeliest cause of
the spontaneous expression of these viruses is environmental stress from
modern living.  This Malthusian belief could have come straight out of the
Environmental Defense Fund Newsletter.  By many standards, humans are
living in an environment much less stressful than in times past.  Even the
third world has made dramatic strides in reducing mortality and increasing
quality of life.  Food is more abundant than ever.  Modern medicine has
cured many diseases that formerly scourged the planet.  When I think back
on things like the Black Plague, I can't really believe that we live in
some uniquely stressful time for humanity.  Quite the opposite in fact.

The other bothersome thing was how Bear pointed to gaps in the fossil
record to provide evidence for his claim that current notions of evolution
are wrong.  Creationists have pointed at this for years as evidence of the
Divine origins of life, and have been roundly lambasted for it.  Now
someone who embraces evolution (at least in this book, and I presume in
real life) points to this as a "problem" and wouldn't you know it just
happens to have a "solution" that preserves an evolutionary basis for the
origins of life.  You can't play it both ways boys.  If there's a problem
with the fossil record, then it's a problem right now, not just when you
have a solution for it, even a fictional one.

I'm not bringing this up in order to argue that the world is 6,000 years
old.  It was just something that bugged me.

But despite its problems, I thought this was a good, solid book.  It's an
excellent pick for anyone who likes their SF diamond hard, but is good
enough as a story to appeal to those who don't.  I think this could have
good mainstream crossover success.  Books about viruses -- for example,
The Hot Zone -- have done well with the general public, and I think this
novel could too.

%A Bear, Greg
%T Darwin's Radio
%I Del Rey
%D 1999-09
%G ISBN 0-345-42333-X
%P 430 pp.
%O hardcover, US$24.00

Reviewed on 1999-10-02

Aaron M. Renn ([email-masked]) http://www.urbanophile.com/arenn/