A review by nwhyte
Darwin's Radio by Greg Bear

3.0

http://www.nicholaswhyte.info/sf/beadar.htm[return][return]Darwin's Radio is set in the very near future, perhaps in 2001 under what sounds like a McCain presidency. All over the world a mysterious disease is striking pregnant women, causing miscarriages. But the victims immediately become pregnant again with strangely deformed embryos - and, it seems, they may not have conceived by the normal method. Add to this the discovery of a couple of Neanderthal bodies in the Alps, with their baby which appears to be far more similar to modern humans than it should be, and you have the makings of a crisis which will reshape the world.[return][return]This book appealed to several of my own past experiences. As a teenager I worked on a couple of archaeology sites, so I could relate to the thrill of discovering ancient corpses with which the book starts. The passages set in (ex-Soviet) Georgia, exploring mass graves, reminded me very much of my time in Bosnia for obvious reasons. The development of biological theory in the book brought me back to the days when I taught tutorials for a course on the history of evolution theories taught by Peter Bowler in Belfast.[return][return]The three main characters are Mitch Rafelson, a discredited anthropologist, Kaye Lang, a geneticist, and Christopher Dicken, a government-paid epidemiologist. All three are convincing and forced to make tough choices throughout. At the crucial moment when they meet, half way through the book, they realise that the mysterious disease may be more than an epidemic; it may in fact be the next step in human evolution.[return][return]The social and political reaction to the biological crisis is quite convincingly nightmarish. Bear portrays the religious right seizing the agenda in the US, and then not being able to produce anything more than repression. Rafelson and Lang, who have become lovers, flee for an Indian reservation (why not Canada?); Dicken guiltily sides with the government. A shadowy conspiracy involving an Austrian professor, an American millionaire and a reporter from the Economist seems to be offering hope for the future, but we don't hear much more about it.[return][return]I did wonder what was happening in the rest of the world all this time. This virus, supposedly triggered by overcrowding, is first picked up in Georgia, which is not a notably overcrowded country (indeed several parts of it have become distinctly underpopulated in recent years) and of course this goes even more so for the United States. Why did it not hit genuinely overcrowded parts of the world like sub-Saharan Africa? (I suppose the grim answer may be that AIDS has already done the job.)[return][return]At the end of the day I wasn't completely satisfied by Darwin's Radio. The "next step in human evolution" is an old, old science fiction storyline, with an honorable past including most works by Olaf Stapledon, and Arthur C Clarke's Childhood's End. But Darwin's Radio will I think be ranked with Frank Herbert's rather minor The Santaroga Barrier rather than at the level of Bear's own earlier work with the same theme, "Blood Music". I wondered a little why the author chose to tackle this theme again. And I felt that somehow the pacing of events was not so much science fiction as "technothriller", as New Scientist put it.