Important Information

Title: Darwin’s Children

Author: Greg Bear

Publisher: Random House

Cover art: even better subject then before… love the prone head and eye-of-the-world but like before the garish lettering ruins it.   

Length: 400 pages in hardcover

Rating

3 out of 7 (what a disappointment… what a book this could have been)

“In the near future, a human patient acquires a kidney from a pig during a transplant operation. The pig kidney then releases viruses into the woman’s blood; these ultimately pass into the general population, resulting in the creation of mutants. These children have a heightened sense of smell, emitting odors to express emotions.”

--Washington Post

This is unbelievable! The post got this synopsis of the plot absolutely dead-freaking-wrong! As in factually inaccurate!!! As in, claiming that the plot of the Three Little Pigs was sibling rivalry because they used such different building materials and slaughtered each other. This reads like the work of a high school student trying to write a blue-book exam answer off of partially read Cliff’s Notes! The SHEVA virus is most specifically not the result of a virus from a pig kidney. Bear makes a special point—and indeed a great part of the earlier Darwin's Radio—in explaining about how dormant retroviruses are causing great evolutionary leaps as some of the more aggressive theories in the field today predict. This pig kidney stuff comes from a single misread chapter about one of the patients suffering from complications of the SHEVA virus. This is the point of the entire two books (to date) series and the Post got it completely wrong!! Such a bald admission of having not even read the book coming from a major publication like the Post is bordering on the slanderous and the obscene. It absolutely disgusts us. That they can get away with it shows how far speculative fiction has to go in order to gain respectability. 

“Though cast in a thriller mode, like much of Bear’s recent work, this novel may contain too much complex discussion of evolutionary genetics to appeal to Michael Crichton or Robin Cook fans. Nonetheless, Bear’s sure sense of character, his fluid prose style and the fascinating culture his ‘Shevite’ children begin to develop all make for serious SF of the highest order.”

--Publisher’s Weekly

PW correctly point out the bothersome moments in this book when Bear launches into expository genetics. What’s bothersome, though, is that these sections are delivered dutifully—like a 6^th grader reading an essay in front of a class. The best writers—both fiction and non-fiction alike—are able to inject an ineffable excitement and grace in to the exposition that fires the imagination. Instead, these segments have all the excitement of someone reporting stock prices from the stock market—interesting only to those with very peculiar and specific interest. Bear himself did this much, much better in Darwin’s Radio.

“In Children, Bear sets up a couple of intriguing threads (Mitch gets involved in another anthropological surprise, and Kaye begins having epiphanies—literally), but neither thread really goes anywhere, and the end result feels almost like ‘padding’. To be fair, there’s some mild connectivity, but it’s far less satisfying than the interrelationships of the previous novel.”

--scifidimensions.com

A very brave and correct review from scifidimensions. While Bear makes advances in character development, his varying story layers end up being extremely tenuously related and end with little congruency of purposes: “they don’t go anywhere.” That’s bad for any book in any genre.

Darwin’s Radio was a mild disappointment but still a very decent book with a very exciting concept. The incredible idea of biology and evolution resulting in a new race of humans was tremendously exciting, threatening, and politically explosive. The concept could have been a great book but Bear was unable to fully exploit his own ideas and we were left with a merely decent book.

Darwin’s Children is even more of a disappointment. Although the mystery of the virus has been solved, the ramifications of what to do with hundreds of thousands of clearly superior children is even more exciting and threatening than its predecessor. Even better, where Bear’s characters in Radio lacked a certain depth and distinction from each other they find new voice in Children and show more emotion and range than anything we saw in Radio. What a welcome surprise in a sequel! What a great book this could’ve been!

What a life-changing event this series could have been!!

In the first chapters, we thought we had a 7. We thought we had a major event of a novel. We thought we had something like The Lord of the Rings and that Darwin's Radio served as a kind of prequel like The Hobbit. But sadly, inexplicably, about fifty pages into the thing we realized that this book for some reason did not inspire enough dedication in its own author to bring it properly to life. A stillborn novel, the story wanders between completely disenfranchised storylines that peter out with quiet whimpers (thank you, TS Eliot). None of these storylines possess the force necessary to carry the book and all are given far too little fuel to fully develop. This is a book that starved to death for lack of imaginative nourishment.

We open with 11yr old virus child Stella Nova and Mich and Kaye Rafelson on the run from the hostile government committed (perhaps rightly, one could argue) to protecting the existing and dominant species of human. This opening sequence provides some of the best moments in the book and holds so much promise. The family is eventually forcibly separated and the storylines of Stella, Mich, and Kaye stumbling through their virtually isolated plots end up being extremely underwhelming. 

In violently abrupt shifts (an unfortunate hereditary flaw from Radio) we also open with virus hunter Charles Dicken attempting to track down the cause of new and scary virus mutations. But his tale is even more woefully aimless as he ambles through three different jobs each showing less and less purpose to the overall plot.

In similarly abrupt shifts, we are given short treatises on politicos Mark Augustine and newcomer Rachel Browning. Sadly, after several chapters dealing with both characters, their plotlines serve so little purpose that they are unceremoniously dumped and forgotten like so much used up and smelly kitty litter by the author.

The most astonishing lapse comes in the resurrection of virus child Strong Will from Radio—who played the part of the the “noble savage” and oozed dramatic potential with every sentence orbiting his presence—who suddenly parts from the story near the end with such little ceremony you’d have thought that the character reaction was from reading the obituary of some long-dead and obscure painter from a foreign country on a museum wall.

Bear clearly gives up at the end of this novel. With great leaping of years, to the short chapters, to the underdeveloped Sheva society, to the failed launching of treatises on the place of God and epiphany in a novel about evolution, anthropology, and biology, we wee an author who has capitulated to the overwhelming burden of creating the story he at first envisioned.

Darwin’s Children is really like this: full of set-up and a vague sense of promise only to be let down. It’s hard to describe what this is like. We can only assume that Bear became very, very weary of his own story. It’s a Sisyphean task to research the science with the kind of scrutiny that he so obviously devoted to his subject and lavished on his story and then fully commit to the repercussions with the world of political structure as a result not to mention fully develop individual reactions from over one-dozen characters of high intelligence.

And it daunts him.

Sad because the book had such enormous potential. Where the high concept of Radio was in the science, the great concept of Children is in the children. How does a new society develop both as a potential new species and as a result of incarceration and oppression is something rife with potential energy that would appeal to legion speculative fiction fans out there craving exactly something like this. Orson Scott Car made himself famous by tackling the subject of this kind of childhood in Ender’s Game. Bear had a chance for the same kind of success and a series of books that would’ve been vastly superior to Ender but he has not the strength to see it through.

Points for writing better. Demerits for delivery. Sorry Bear… we hope you get your mojo back.

While we didn’t expect Radio to necessarily change the biological thriller forever like a great book would’ve done we expect it to exert some amount of influence. Certainly, authors speaking of retroviruses and potential effects on genetics and evolution will have to consider Bear for the near-term future. Beyond that, Children will not have any sort of influence. It has nothing new to add to the science and it fails to deliver on potentially new ground broken over a different kind of human species. Other writers will take up this challenge and deliver better. Darwin’s Children, if remembered at all, will only be remembered in connection with Darwin’s Radio.

Many of the devoted fans of Bear who read with relish Darwin’s Radio will eagerly look forward to buying this book. For them, it will be a very quick and, perhaps in some ways, a satisfying read. It will answer certain questions about “what happened next” and could even leave room for yet a third novel. It is otherwise a harmless novel that will not enlighten but not irritate a reading audience.

Those who are enthralled with Radio for its science should be warned away from this book—the only appealing science is in speculation about how a superior species would evolve. The machinery built to create bestsellers out of thin air are engaged and running full steam for this book—those who are looking for good “hard” SF should not believe this propaganda and avoid this book. There is better material out there. For our money, the best available is still written by Kim Stanley Robinson. Those readers looking for exciting books regarding the development of precocious children in oppressed environments should also look elsewhere… in some ways, Ender’s Game still owns the market on that concept.