Spins an unlikely idea into a plausible tale | Darwin's Radio

Compelling idea, but doesn't deliver | Darwin's Radio | Greg Bear

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	• Darwin's Radio Greg Bear Ballantine Books, 2000 - 544 pages average customer review:based on 265 reviews view larger image
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Intriguing combination of sci-fi and medical mystery thriller!

There are "junk" DNA segments in every one of our cells. This DNA has unknown function, appears selectively neutral, and is conserved over generations.

What if it has a purpose, and the switch is thrown?

Mitch Rafelson (anthropologist) and Kaye Lang (molecular biologist) team up to understand "Herod's flu", which makes women pregnant (sans men) and heralds in a neo-Neanderthal (?) form of humanity. Evolution in action, perhaps, although any change in gene frequency still requires the new young to survive and reproduce.

Greg Bear takes on the challenge of discussing human genetics and virology in Darwin's Radio. This has the novel bogging down in places, and the "Kaye and Mitch against the world" plot is overdone. However, this was still an interesting and exciting story, and one that encourages me to read more of Greg Bear's novels.

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Spins an unlikely idea into a plausible tale

Archaelogist Mitch Rafelson has become an outcast among his peers, because he put a Native American tribe's request that he respect a "specimen" as the bones of one of their ancestors ahead of his duty to the institution employing him. In Europe, looking for a way to restart his career, he's manipulated by an unscrupulous couple who want him to help them find a buyer for the remarkable thing they've discovered hidden away in a high mountain cave: three bodies, frozen thousands of years ago. "Another Ice Man," they think, assuming that their find can make them rich, and also assuming that Mitch's sullied reputation means he won't mind doing as they demand. The frozen bodies are those of a man, a woman, and a newborn infant. The two adults wear curious masks, and the woman's abdomen has been pierced deeply by a sharpened stick.

In Georgia (the one that used to be part of the U.S.S.R.), fellow scientist Kaye Lang is called away from her work to help determine what happened to the people whose bodies have been uncovered in a mass grave. She's startled to discover that the grave holds only men and pregnant women. All of the bodies wear peculiar mask-like skin growths, and all of the women have been shot in the abdomen.

So begin the stories of two people who find themselves drawn together in solving the same mystery, which soon starts manifesting itself all around the world. As ancient retroviruses infect human couples of childbearing age, strange and frightening pregnancies result. Is what's happening the most dangerous epidemic the species has ever experienced? Or is it incontrovertible proof that humans evolve not gradually, as scientists have believed for decades, but in sudden leaps dictated by "programming" carried in each individual's genetic code?

Author Bear takes an intriguing but (to me, at least, initially) unlikely idea and proceeds to spin it into a plausible tale. His characters are believable, too, and the story is both exciting and well paced. I'm now eager to read the second volume.

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Compelling idea, but doesn't deliver

Imagine a cross between the convoluted scientific theories of Michael Crichton with the thrilling medical researchers found in any of Robin Cook's medical mysteries and you will land yourself with a copy of Greg Bear's novel, Darwin's Radio. The 92-chaptered book tracks a large list of characters on their travels (and intertwining love affairs) as they attempt to research a new form of endogenous retrovirus, known as SHEVA or Herod's flu. Using a fictional disease, Bear argues that there is no way that evolution couldn't have happened, and it is still happening to this day.

I enjoyed the ideas in this book, but was really uninterested in the characters and their stories. Honestly, I would have liked the book to be a quicker read with more suspense.
A+ on the evolutionary theory.
B- on the story

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evolution without direction

Greg Bear presents a novel biological mechanism for Evolution. Once it starts rolling, most people freak out. Eventually the novel is over and we know people are still freaking out.

A 2000 HUGO AWARD NOMINEE

Ancient diseases encoded in the DNA of humans wait like sleeping dragons to wake and infect again--or so molecular biologist Kaye Lang believes. And now it looks as if her controversial theory is in fact chilling reality. For Christopher Dicken, a "virus hunter" at the Epidemic Intelligence Service, has pursued an elusive flu-like disease that strikes down expectant mothers and their offspring. Then a major discovery high in the Alps --the preserved bodies of a prehistoric family--reveals a shocking link: something that has slept in our genes for millions of years is waking up.

Now, as the outbreak of this terrifying disease threatens to become a deadly epidemic, Dicken and Lang must race against time to assemble the pieces of a puzzle only they are equipped to solve--an evolutionary puzzle that will determine the future of the human race . . . if a future exists at all.

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