A Review of Darwin's Radio by Greg Bear

Title: Darwin’s Radio

Author: Greg Bear

Publisher: Random House

Cover art: the color and subject are coolly evocative… but the garish lettering sort of ruins the effect

Length: 448 pages in trade paperback

Rating

5 out of 7 (great, great idea but falters in the execution)

“Regrettably, he exits his stronghold midway through and begins spinning a yarn of government subterfuge. At one point, agents pursue our heroes, creating a clichéd movie impression that a car-chase scene must be just around the corner. And during the book’s concluding chapters, Kaye and Mitch seem to lose the very scientific chutzpah that helped them in earlier jams.”

--scifidimensions.com, Randy Sekeres)

This is ludicrous. The ending of the book is very plausible and, while the protagonists dream of movie clichés, they are often sadly ineffectual as their acts fail to live up to their imagined heroism. These are the most poignant moments in the book and a long way from formulaic action movies.

“My one criticism is that it takes the characters overlong to realize what is obvious to the reader from early on, and it might benefit from reaching its inevitable conclusion sooner.”

--warpcoresf.com, Rosalind Jackson)

Now this is really a dumb thing to say. It’s obvious to the reader because Bear has gone to great lengths to set up the story that way. The reader is given privileged information to which the characters do not have access. Complain about the pacing. Complain about the lack of competing ideas among the scientists. But don’t say something like this (especially after earlier in the review Jackson bragged about her own lack of understanding in Biology).

“Darwin’s Radio is an entertaining, even riveting story, delivered poetically. It portrays scientists as real people, responding to the intense politics of the biomedical world, the funding imperative in public and private sector alike, and the terrifying challenge of a disease that threatens to decimate the human species.”

--Nature

If Nature is going to bother with a review, then you’d better take notice. The publishing world is, we think, beginning to take seriously the notion that good science can lead to good literature and we show Nature’s review here as evidence of this phenomenon (rage against the technobabble!). Such a respectable publication would not laud a sci-fi book unless the science could be taken seriously.

“This isn’t the first time Bear has written about the twilight of homo sapiens and I’m sure it won’t be the last. But it isn’t the best time he’s done it either. I found much to admire in this story; I found a lot of missed opportunities to shake my head at as well… Bear is more interested in the scientific puzzle that needs solving than he is the human lives that are devastated by it. And I think that leaves the book lacking, for all the brilliance of the ideas.”

--sfreviews.net

Definitely… there were plenty of missed opportunities in this book. Like Alastair Reynolds, Bear seems better at the science than he is at the writing.

Greg Bear has been around a long time and published many books. Darwin’s Radio has recently brought him quite a bit of attention especially after winning the Nebula award. In all, Radio is a deserving book and generally worthwhile to read. But as is often the case with bestselling award winners that dare Great Things with the plot, there’s quite a lot of inflated praise and hyperbole. Don’t buy into that.

First, a plea: publishers—most particularly those we notice with Greg Bear and Alastair Reynolds—seem to feel like books with a lot of good science need to have really short chapters. How bloody annoying is that! Many, many chapters are less than two pages! Let the scenes develop a bit, please? People who enjoy books with loads of biology in them can certainly be assumed to have an attention span greater than 300 seconds. Just knock it off, already! That is not a good way to present a book.

Enough personal quibbles. This is a biological thriller—a kind of virus novel only with implications regarding evolution and the notion of species-level sacrifice. Exciting ideas to say the least! But the book opens rather clumsily. The first chapter is a striking narrative of Mitch Rafelson climbing the Alps to discover dessicated but preserved mummies of ancient proto-humans. Cool! Then we (abrupty!) switch to Kaye Lang investigating a massacre in Georgia (Russia). Sort of cool. Then it’s off (abruptly) to the CDC to see Charles Dickens and Mark Augustine beginning to plan matters politic regarding new discoveries in retroviruses. Then abruptly back to Mitch in the hospital. Who was Mitch again?

Now we’re getting dizzy.

These three plot lines will eventually merge into a coherent whole but it takes a very long time to get them together. The sheer length of setting up all of these things does tend to make the reader forget what a shocking coincidence the convergence of these events are, which would be a bigger problem if it were more noticeable.

Or maybe the leaping chapters help disguise coincidence as well. The plot just won’t stay still long enough for someone to notice a flaw.

The concept of the story, and what Rafelson, Dickens, and Lang are moving to discover, is absolutely brilliant. Based on a perfect blend of very good biological science and leaping speculative thought is the idea that human evolution is punctuated—as many scientists and other learned people are beginning to believe—but punctuated by a set of conditions that when met execute a series of instructions from long-dormant material in the genetic code. To the point—and minor spoiler here—it is the case that humans can evolve in as little as one generation.

This is really great stuff. This is the kind of thing speculative fiction is made for. It allows the author and the reader to explore a population’s reaction to such a scary notion that they’re about to become obsolete and extinct. It bring into conflict parents’ love for children and their instinct for self-preservation as a species. And what does the government do in such an event? And how do scientists react?

Once this tale gets going, Radio is fascinating to think on.

But sadly, Bear doesn’t follow through on the potential here and—despite the good science and great imagination—does not really have the skill to complete a work of true literary merit.

His greatest problem is his character development. Are they believable? Yes. Do they behave as one might imagine in a crisis? Certainly. The problem is that they’re nearly impossible to distinguish from each other. Man from woman, biologist to anthropologist. Scientist to politician. Indian to white man. The book reads like a one-person play by a skilled actor but with very limited range. This desperately exacerbates the problem of pacing, shifting plot setting, and doesn’t do the examination of the human crisis any favors.

You see, it’s not enough to set up a great idea. The author has to follow through and bewilder the reader not only with “what if this happened” but also beguile the reader with “oh my God look what they did when that happened.” The very greatest books allow us to learn new things about ourselves as we project our personalities across the action and reactions of the characters on the page. When they merge into facelessness—as Bear’s characters do—something vital is lost. The great sci-fi authors: Gene Wolfe, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Neal Stephenson (and notable mainstream authors like Stephen King and James Michener) for example, are all very adept at executing their concept through differentiated and reified characters. Bear’s characters behave like real people but remain flat: undifferentiated and caricatured.

A bit too dense to be a page-turner and a bit too underwhelming to be literature in that critically acclaimed sense, Radio will end up on the bestseller lists for its science and its brilliantly daring concept. We think it highly likely that this will end up as a movie. But books like these do not survive past 5-10 years of publishing success. Bear will be responsible for bringing to the fore the notion of punctuated evolution but in the coming decades few will be able to attribute that genesis to Darwin’s Radio. Other authors will take up this idea and make it a lasting one. This book will never make it to the bibliophile’s showcase shelf in the library.

If you like virus thrillers like Preston’s The Hot Zone or Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain then you will really like this book. It’s a very quick read and a very intriguing one for educated readers who have at least a passing understanding in human evolution. An excellent choice for any holiday.

Reader’s who get easily confused, frustrated, or impatient with long (though the brief chapters help this) discussions in science and conference rooms as the setting for plot development should avoid this book. There is not a single gun shot.  There is not a fist-fight. There is one (rather steamy!) sex scene. But this book generally lacks all of the items that makes for a traditional Hollywood action movie (Hollywood will fix that in the screenplay for sure). The suspense is all intellectual. If action is the thing you’re looking for in book, you’ll need to look elsewhere.