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20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Eerie., September 12, 2002
With an apocalyptic vision at its heart, Blood Music is escapist reading with high drama, though its excitement has been somewhat muted by time and the magnitude of the real events which have transpired since its publication in 1985. Here a genetic experiment goes awry, and the whole world is endangered. When Vergil Ulam, a cross between Dennis-the-Menace and a stereotyped nerd, is fired from his job, he takes his private research with him--by injecting himself with intellectual lymphocytes, cellular computers, which he has developed. Not unexpectedly with Vergil, things go wrong, and these cells take over his body and eventually spread wildly, endangering the whole world.
Though only seventeen years have passed since its publication, the book feels old-eerily so. Gene therapy is now a reality. The Soviet Union, which here rattles its nuclear sabers in an effort to dominate the world, seems like a very old enemy. Strangely, a number of particularly vivid scenes here take place in a ravaged World Trade Center, images so similar to the present reality that I found them painful to stumble upon in a piece of light fiction. Suzy McKenzie, a lonely survivor in New York, sets up home in the World Trade Center lobby, and Bear's descriptions of her explorations through the desolate upper floors and of the collapse of one of the towers conjured up nightmarish images for me which Bear could never have foretold and which some readers may wish to avoid.
Bear's narrative is fast-paced and suspenseful. With an acute sensibility and eye for detail, Bear creates stark images. His characterizations of Vergil and Suzy are often touching, however, and the dialogue between Vergil and his mother will bring smiles to the faces of many parents. Structurally, the novel is very loose, with characters who come and go, and ultimately the novel feels almost as chaotic as Bear's vision of devastation. Bear's immense potential, obvious here, finds its true fulfillment in his later, more carefully controlled, novels. Mary Whipple
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A terrific story that loses focus, April 10, 2002
The difficulty with evaluating this unusual novel lies in a structural peculiarity - Bear has really written two different novels here, featuring different main characters who are responding to what are very much radically different situations. The first half of this book is the story of Vergil
Ulam, a secretive research scientist developing microscopic biological computers who stumbles onto something much more than he bargained for. The focus is clearly on Vergil, his personal struggles with his employers, his mother, and his own social ineptitude. Readers will watch with fascination and horror as Vergil opens a biological Pandora's box, and wonder just how he's going to get out of the mess he's created. But it seems Bear wanted to go beyond Vergil's problems to the story of the nanotech beings themselves, so he wrote another (virtually) separate story describing the nanites spread, and after the auspicious beginning, this second half is a considerable disappointment. The point of view shifts away from Vergil to a number of different characters, some of whom were bit players in the first part, but many of whom are introduced for the first time in the second half. Plus, there's a lot of jumping around between these characters, each having something to show us (although it's often very little), but none of them ever becoming a strong enough central character to hold this part of the book together, leaving this second half painfully unfocused, and almost entirely disconnected from the characters and events of the first half.Recapping, the first half of this book is tightly written and powerful, with a strong central protagonist whose motivations and character are carefully delineated. Bear includes enough scientific background to make his plot plausible, and given recent technological breakthroughs in nanotechnology, his story doesn't seem half as wild as it must have been 15 years ago.
Gripping and suspenseful, this first 'sub-novel' easily deserves a 5 star rating, but the latter section is hardly worthy of a masterpiece. Rambling, unfocused, and extrapolating way over his head, Bear leaves us with a hopelessly ambiguous ending that seriously undercuts the story - like reading a mystery that never reveals the solution. Overall, this is one very intense novel with a slow second act and no third act to speak of. The 3 star rating is an attempt to reflect the duality of this volume, which is really anything but average.
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
a gripping and inventive novel, May 17, 1999
By A Customer
I read this novel yesterday - literally read it in one sitting - maybe not so good for my productivity at work today (I was up until 4 in the morning reading it) but this was one I couldn't put down. Good writing and a gripping idea. This is NOT a conventional "horrific plague" novel, although it appears to be so at the beginning. I do agree that there are problems with characterization. The logic of his idea leads Bear to introduce and kill off (sort of) a series of main characters, so they don't have much chance to develop. Despite this problem, characterization is one of the stronger points in Blood Music's first half, although it gives way in the second half to development of a visionary idea. I DID feel sufficient sympathy with the characters to feel them as real and to care about what happened to them. The power of Blood Music is that it starts off as a "plague" novel and by novel's end has brilliantly turned this premise on its head. Over the past decades, I haven't read much science fiction, including several sci fi novels with good reputations that I started but didn't see any reason to finish. Blood Musicis my first intro to Greg Bear, and based on its quality and the grudging respect that even some of its carping critics have for Bear's other novels, I plan to read more of his stuff.
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