BOOK REVIEW: Darwin's Radio/Darwin's Children by Greg Bear

Darwin's Radio
Darwin's Radio won the 2000 Nebula Award and was nominated for several other prestigious awards recognizing excellence in speculative fiction (The Hugo Awards, Locus Award and John W. Campbell Award). It is often listed as one of the classic works of science fiction.

The story centers around molecular biologist Kaye Lang, who years before posited that human endogenous retroviruses could possibly influence human evolution. She is proven prophetic when a retrovirus called SHEVA is identified in pregnant women who have been undergoing miscarriages but then becoming pregnant a month later without sexual activity. The other main character is Mitch Rafelson, an anthropologist who is led to an incredible find of an intact ancient hominid family (male, female and child) in the Republic of Georgia by two unscrupulous people who disappear into an avalanche which Mitch barely survives himself. Initially, all children born of SHEVA pregnancies die (or are aborted when the government starts giving out RU-486 like candy) but eventually a SHEVA child is born and they (and their parents) look like mutated humans.

Greg Bear's plot follows Kaye and Mitch (who, unsurprisingly, pair up and have the first SHEVA child, deliberately), especially their interactions with various government bureaucrats. Humanity is generally freaked out by the occurrence of women who can get pregnant on their own (although only immediately after a failed pregnancy and in the company of the 99% of males and females who possess SHEVA) and this leads to some extreme behavior by the government as well as a superheated escalation of the war between the sexes.

One simple way to  review Greg Bear's Darwin's Radio is to say "too much information." Bear provides too much information about the microbiological details of the virus, with pages and pages of barely comprehensible speculation about the implications and sources of the SHEVA virus. He also provides too much information about the internecine turf battles between scientists cum bureaucrats at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) versus the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). He definitely provides too much information about Kaye and Mitch, both their relationship and their internal monologues.

Generally, the overall idea of a retrovirus which creates the next stage of human evolution and the societal impact such a discovery and outbreak has upon the United States is an excellent one. It's all the other stuff (characterization, plot development and pacing) which dragged Darwin's Radio down for me.


Title: Darwin's Radio
Author: Greg Bear
Length: 544 pages.
Publisher: Ballantine Books.
Date: July 5, 2000.

OVERALL GRADE: B/B-.

PLOT: B-.

IMAGERY: B.

IMPACT: B+.

WRITING: B-.

Darwin's Children
Darwin's Children is the sequel to the award-winning Darwin's Radio. It follows the events depicted in the first book pretty closely, although 9 years have passed. Kaye and Mitch's SHEVA daughter, named Stella Nova, has never met any other "Virus Children." Kaye, Mitch and Stella have been in hiding in the rural  Virgina countryside. Unbeknownst to them, they have been under surveillance by the Government's Emergency Action forces. Stella runs away from home and is captured by a virus child bounty hunter who takes her to a "safe house" where she meets other members of homo sapiens nouveau like herself. She also gets exposed to a new virus which is killing virus children. Mitch and Kaye are able to rescue Stella but only for a little while--she is eventually captured and placed into the government "schools" which are little more than holding facilities or government-run prisons to confine the virus children that no one knows what to do with.

Bears's portrayal of the social dynamics between the Shevite children in the schools is some of the most interesting aspects of the book, but it is a small fraction of the novel. Eventually, he returns to Kaye's story and Mitch's story and they just are not interesting enough to maintain the reader's curiousity. Kaye's a Nobel-calibre microbiologist who predicted the possibility that SHEVA-like viruses inherent in the human genome could impact humanity's evolution. Mitch is an empathetic anthropologist who can unearth skeletons of long-lost civilizations through his dreams.

Bear again focuses a bit too much on the power dynamics between various government agencies, and this time raises the heat a notch by bringing up political and religious differences which lead to terrorist activities.
Eventually we get to see how a society of all Shevite children would look, and the book ends with the inevitable occurrence of the next generation: Shevites having children of their own.

Overall, since there is more focus on the Shevite children themselves in this book, Darwin's Children ends up being more compelling than Darwin's Radio, but it is hard to imagine reading the sequel without reading the other book first.

Title: Darwin's Children

Author: Greg Bear

Length: 512 pages.

Publisher: Ballantine Books. 

Date: June 1, 2004.

OVERALL GRADE: B.

PLOT: B.

IMAGERY: B.

IMPACT: B+.

WRITING: B-.