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Review - Blood Music - Greg Bear

Science authors' favourites - Marcus Chown

A scientist engineers blood cells to be as intelligent as rhesus monkeys. When he is fired from his job, the only way to save his project is to inject himself with the cells. Pretty soon they're re-designing his body and he's having conversations with his own blood cells. After he has a bath, skin cells go down the plug hole and infect the whole biomass of North America. And this is only the beginning! With Greg Bear, the ideas come so thick and fast that you've hardly come to terms with one amazing revelation before he hits you with the next. Blood Music is his best novel.

On the downside, it's hard to feel much for any of the characters - this is very much in the vein of an epic, where characters are there to illustrate a point, not to identify with them. Also, towards the end, it gets rather confusing as to exactly what's going on. But this doesn't stop this being a work that's packed with brilliant ideas.

Want to hear more? Here's the blurb:

The award winning tale of the inevitable take-over of our society by a benign, intelligent scientific experiment gone awry. In the tradition of the greatest cyberpunk novels, Blood Music explores the imminent destruction of mankind and the fear of mass destruction by technological advancements. Blood Music follows present-day events in which the fears concerning the nuclear annihilation of the world subsided after the Cold War and the fear of chemical warfare spilled over into the empty void of nuclear fear. An amazing breakthrough in genetic engineering made by Vergil Ulam is considered too dangerous for further research, but rather than destroy his work, he injects himself with his creation and walks out of his lab, unaware of just quite how his actions will change the world. Author Greg Bears treatment of the traditional tale of scientific hubris is both suspenseful and a compelling portrait of a new intelligence emerging amongst us, irrevocably changing our world.

Reviewed by Marcus Chown and Brian Clegg

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