Greg Bear (1951-2022)

Just heard that the science-fiction writer Greg Bear had passed away. I read [a French translation of] Blood Music in 1985 or 1986, and while I did not like the second half so much, I remember being impressed by the originality of the story when compared with classics like Asimov’s Foundation trilogy. (Little did I know that Bear would later contribute to the Foundation corpus by Foundation and Chaos, which I have not read to this day.) Later, much later, I read Hull Zero Three, again an original (if space-operatic) book, and Darwin’s Radio, which remains one of my favourite books in science fiction, if only because it is deeply grounded into science. Followed by Darwin’s Children this very summer. (I may have read Moving Mars as the story synopsis sounds familiar, but I am unsure…) A great writer, to whom I am grateful for all the gripping time spent on his page-turning books!

Darwin’s radio [book review]

When in Sacramento two weeks ago I came across the Beers Books Center bookstore, with a large collection of used and (nearly) new cheap books and among other books I bought Greg Bear’s Darwin Radio. I had (rather) enjoyed another book of his’, Hull Zero Three, not to mention one of his first books, Blood Music, I read in the mid 1980’s, and the premises of this novel sounded promising, not mentioning the Nebula award. The theme is of a major biological threat, apparently due to a new virus, and of the scientific unraveling of what the threat really means. (Spoilers alert!) In that respect it sounds rather similar to the (great) Crichton‘s The Andromeda Strain, which is actually mentioned by some characters in this book. As is Ebola, as a sort of contrapoint (since Ebola is a deadly virus, although the epidemic in Western Africa now seems to have vanished). The biological concept exploited here is dormant DNA in non-coding parts of the genome that periodically get awaken and induce massive steps in the evolution. So massive that carriers of those mutations are killed by locals. Until the day it happens in an all-connected World and the mutation can no longer be stopped. The concept is compelling if not completely convincing of course, while the outcome of a new human race, which is to Homo Sapiens what Homo Sapiens was to Neanderthal, is rather disappointing. (How could it be otherwise?!) But I did appreciate the postulate of a massive and immediate change in the genome, even though the details were disputable and the dismissal of Dawkins‘ perspective poorly defended. From a stylistic perspective, the style is at time heavy, while there are too many chance occurrences, like the main character happening to be in Georgia for a business deal (spoilers, spoilers!) at the times of the opening of collective graves, or the second main character coming upon a couple of Neanderthal mummies with a Sapiens baby, or yet this pair of main characters falling in love and delivering a live mutant baby-girl. But I enjoyed reading it between San Francisco and Melbourne, with a few hours of lost sleep and work. It is a page turner, no doubt! I also like the political undercurrents, from riots to emergency measures, to an effective dictatorship controlling pregnancies and detaining newborns and their mothers.

One important thread in the book deals with anthropology digs getting against Native claims to corpses and general opposition to such digs. This reminded me of a very recent article in Nature where a local Indian tribe had claimed rights to several thousand year old skeletons, whose DNA was then showed to be more related with far away groups than the claimants. But where the tribe was still granted the last word, in a rather worrying jurisprudence.

Broken angels

`Statistically, ‘ she breathed.

`Yeah. You thought of that too. Because statistically, the chances of two expeditions, eighteen months apart both having the bad luck to stumble on deep-space cometary intersections like that?’

`Astronomical.’

Following my enthusiastic trip through Altered Carbon, I read the (2003) sequel Broken Angels within a few days, mostly during my day trip to Shanghai. Not only is it an excellent book, once more!, but Richard Morgan manages to change the plot and the atmosphere so much that it hardly feels as the same character is involved in both. There are a few links with Altered Carbon of course like the past of Kovacs and the reincarnation facilities (resleeving) but so few that the book could read on its own. The setting is very different, in that the main characters try to unearth (!) an artifact from an alien species (rather stupidly, or not?!, called Martians) in the middle of a planet war and in a highly radioactive zone. Apparently no longer sleuth work for Kovacs but a lot of action, even though he needs to uncover traitors, double-traitors and  motivations.  In my opinion, the ancestry of the book once again includes cyberpunks William Gibbson [more Count Zero than Neuromancer, with the predominant role of Voodoo, but still a major role of virtual realities], and Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash), but also Clarke with Rendez-vous with Rama, in that the entry into the Martian vessel is trying to describe an alien culture through its architecture with some degree of success. (In some sense, there is also a link with Greg Bear‘s Blood music, in that the military bioengineers in Broken Angels have designed a self-mutating nanotech device that reconfigures at the molecular level to overcome any new defense it encounters. With overwhelming efficiency. Until it hits the Martian defenses. Something similar to Bear’s blood cells getting progressive control of the Earth…) If I really have to draw a comparison between both volumes, I would reluctantly rank Broken Angels (very) slightly above in that the story was more clearly drawn than Altered Carbon which somewhat suffered from subplots. Today, I found the third Kovacs volume, Woken Furies in my mailbox at Dauphine, so I am looking forward yet another switch in style and background!

Hull Zero Three

“Dreamtime is the reality, obviously, and what I’ve just experienced is a nightmare, but struggle as hard as I can, there’s no way to invert the relationship.” Greg Bear, Hull Zero Three

I very rarely read science-fiction of this kind and I frankly cannot remember why I bought this book by Greg Bear… Maybe the cryptic title? Hull Zero Three sounds intringing enough.. In any case, I found the book a quite interesting read. Of course, most space operas are centred on a spaceship, so this is not a major surprise, but the ambiguity of the nature of the ship is quite appealing (to the reader). The plot itself is somehow secondary as what really matters is to discover where the reality lies. The book is thus much more psychological than action-oriented. Closer to Phillip K. Dick’s Ubik than to Arthur C. Clarke’s Rama…

“Somewhere inside me there is knowledge, but it isn’t integrated. It can only be unleashed by a combination of experience, observation, and …. guilt. Trauma.” Greg Bear, Hull Zero Three

At a primary level, the narrator starts from scratch, having to learn everything about Ship trough experience, with induced memories from an Earth left centuries ago. This is not the most successful part of the story as this nth replica of a unique ancestor is endowed with a complete memory and some of the earlier pages are not self-coherent for this reason. However, the griping pace of the gradual uncovering of the problem with Ship, then with Mother, more than makes up for the above. There are enough turns and surprises along most of the book to keep the reader hooked and the final twist about Destination Guidance was surprising enough to justify all the circumlocutions and the frustrating doubts of the narrator. (As a non-native reader, I also found the never-ending technical description a wee too much for my taste, as I was not so interested in the inner details of the Ship. But the overall style is quite tolerable, with gems like “the constant sound of the hull being sandblasted by the ghosts of unborn worlds” and “a lot of us have died—sometimes hundreds of times“…)