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.


A disappointment   January 9, 2004
 10 out of 21 found this review helpful

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.


This is the way the World ends...   August 14, 2005
 10 out of 11 found this review helpful

...Not with a Bang, or even with a whimper, but with a nasty, fleshy "thlooorp".

Greg Bear's masterpiece "Blood Music" is astonishing. Compelling. Breathtaking. Horrifying. It is a remarkably deft, cogent, pithy little sorcerous book from the Master of "Big Idea" science fiction, so gripping and lucidly written that it will take about three hours to read through it, and three years to think through its implications.

Bear's anti-hero is the socially inept but staggeringly brilliant Vergil Ulam, a cellular biologist who makes a startling discovery with genetically modified human leukocytes (white blood cells Ulam has been tampering with), attempts to contact a rival genetic researcher, gets caught, and promptly finds himself out of a job and---more importantly---out of a laboratory.

With a discovery in hand that could catapult him to the forefront of the field of nanotechnology (the science of creating molecular-level machines that are capable of self-replication), what's a Mad Scientist to do?

He injects himself with the little nanites, of course, and then goes out for a night on the town.

Greg Bear is a consummately gifted science fiction thinker who typically sacrifices character development, plot, and pacing to the more visceral and esoteric ramifications of the science at the core of his stories. "Blood Music", then, is even more of a rare gem, a book in which Bear's scientific acumen and literary craftsmanship come together.

In the first few chapters, "Blood Music" takes on the pace and grue of a horror novel. At first the nanites in Ulam's body do nothing, and the scientist suspects they've been consumed and destroyed; then it becomes apparent that the modified leukocytes are reinventing Ulam, improving him, making benign little modifications: restoring his eyesight overnight, improving his stamina, and tucking his spine under a sheath of flesh (the better to protect it, of course).

What's the harm? The little uber-leukocytes are doing a little Buckminster Fuller number on good old Virgil.

But as with the rest of Bear's best work, "Blood Music" wants to push further into the dark territory of the possible: the nanites get out of control, escape by the billions into society, and start reinventing humanity according to their own internal "blood music."

The novel begins as a whimsical romp at the periphery of scientific knowledge, picks up momentum as an apocalyptic horror tale, and then---oddly enough---ends almost optimistically, playing with Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. The best part of "Blood Music" are the constant, unexpected shifts and changes: just when you think you know where the novel is heading, Bear masterfully, and nastily, alters course.

The field of nanotechnology has come a long way since Bear wrote "Blood Music", and much of what was theoretical then is very possible---if not already in application---now. There's a little deft sentence about Virgil's picking up used biogenetic equipment (freezers, centrifuges, lab equipment) for pennies on the dollar from dead bio-technology startups that have gone out of business.

That little nugget is just so real---so everyday, so the world we're living in---that it gives me goosebumps just writing about it.

With that in mind, "Blood Music" is a delicious and unforgettable journey into the horror and hope of a mysterious and powerful science, and one of the classics of modern science fiction.

JSG