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Darwin Children A Novel Darwin Radio Greg Bear 9780345448361 Books

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Darwin Children A Novel Darwin Radio Greg Bear 9780345448361 Books

What happens when our species sees a change it cannot comprehend? How do scientists deal with understanding what is happening when their conventional methods are unable to give answers? Can separate but almost equal once again be an answer? This is science fiction but it could almost be our history and yet it is a lesson for the future.
There is much food for thought running through the pages of this book. I kept asking myself, what would I have thought and how would I have reacted? Would I have felt threatened, accepting, loving? A very good read.


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Darwin Children A Novel Darwin Radio Greg Bear 9780345448361 Books Reviews

I enjoyed this sequel to Darwin's Radio. It was as touching and affective (and suspenseful) as the first novel. I also appreciated the hard-science plot and the definitions and sources in the back of DC. I had spent a fair amount of reading time wondering how much of the whole genomic story could possibly ever happen.

Not much, apparently, though Bear makes clear that molecular biologists aren't all that sure. (Somehow I had overlooked the genetic origin of viruses and that explication, alone, was worth the price of admission.) I also liked the blending of science and belief. It was surprising and well done.

I could have done without the villainy attached to the Republicans and Foxnews. As I recall, when SF masters like Heinlein blamed pols, they did not specify party and used fictitious journalists as stand-ins for the industry. I wonder why writers like Bear (and Stross, to name another who does it) feel the need to push their personal politics in their readers' faces. Sign of the times, I suppose, or maybe their editors/publishers require it. Still, despite this flaw (neither book wallows in it), both were worthy, absorbing tales I recommend to all, whether hard SF fans or not. Bring a hanky.
Greg Bear is one of my favorite SF authors but I must say Darwin's Children is a real let down. Darwin's Children, the sequel to Darwin's Radio, continues the story of a species of hominids born as result of genetic mutations caused by retroviruses. The theory behind the story is that great leaps in human evolution have occurred suddenly as a result of these mutations - the first being a leap from Neanderthals to present day humans in the distant past. The story's focal point is Stella Nova Rafelson who was born in the previous novel. Society, frightened by these new offspring create what are essentially concentration camps for these children and all are required to be placed in them. Stella's parents, Kaye and Mitch, have been hiding out from the authorities but are eventually caught. We see how society treats these children and how they interact with one another throughout the novel as Bear attempts to explore a new species and conjectures about what the future holds for their assimilation into and obviously in the long term, absorption of the human species into something new.

The key problem with the novel is that the characters are not that believable and a bit rigid. The story really meanders and gets very tedious and frankly doesn't really go anywhere until the end of the story. Kaye Rafelson, who has an "epiphany" or religious experience, is a dead-end thread of the story and poorly explored.

I'm a bit disappointed in this novel.
I like Greg Bear, I like most of his writing, and I appreciate many of his 'big ideas' in hard SF. The one bit about "Darwin's Children" that did not gel were the episodes of Kate's epiphanies, her being overwhelmed by an oceanic sense of unqualified acceptance. These episodes somehow seemed very important to Bear's notion of story development but remained unexplored and never explained or even clearly speculated about. A shame and rather too hand-wavy for my taste.
Darwin's Children picks up the story begun in Darwin's Radio 12 years after the first wave of Shevite Children were born. Kaye, Mitch and their "new human" daughter, Stella are still on the run from an authoritarian government agency determined to house all Shevite children in schools - little more than prisons - where unscrupulous research can be performed on the kids and segregated from the general population which fears they carry viruses that would decimate the world. As time progresses, Kaye returns to the political fight for freedom for the Shivite Children while Mitch returns to field work, and is clued in to a discovery in Washington State that might destroy the Emergency Action Committee's case against keeping the Shevite Children separated from the rest of the population. As popular opinion in the country beings to turn more sympathetic towards the Shevite Children, their fate my ultimately be decided by a colony of runaways and escapees.

The concept presented in Darwin's Radio and concluded (?) in Darwin's Children really is a fascinating one and Greg Bear should be commended for presenting new, refreshing material. While I enjoyed Darwin's Children a bit more than Darwin's Radio, I was still waffling between giving it three and four stars, as it does suffer some of the same problems as it's predecessor. Darwin's Children is presented as three novelettes, taking place 12, 15 and 17 years after the first wave of Shevite births. As another reviewer noted, each section of the novel "jumps" just as things are getting interesting or a major reveal is about to happen. While we eventually get to see the results of previous sections of the book, it's only as anecdotes in the next section. To use a sports analogy, the books is basically three good baseball games, which my wife turns off in the 8th inning, leaving me to relying on ESPN to see the final results the next day.

Darwin's Children returns most of the point of view characters from the previous novel, including a much changed Mark Augustine, worn out by years of back room politics and now much more sympathetic towards the Shevite children, Christopher Dickens, who is still trying to figure out the mystery of the SHEVA virus, plus Mitch and Kaye and their Shevite child, Stella. For me, Stella is the most interesting character and the descriptions of the Shevite children and their cultural development inside and outside the schools is fascinating. Kaye remains a distracting character, one I'm convinced would have no chance of surviving the life of a wanted, on-the-run mother living on the fringe of society, and her religious epiphany seems to go nowhere other than to give Bear a chance to present his opinion on god.

So after a brief debate, I gave Darwin's Children four stars because despite it's flaws, I found myself enjoying the book and continually wanting to see what happens on the next page.
What happens when our species sees a change it cannot comprehend? How do scientists deal with understanding what is happening when their conventional methods are unable to give answers? Can separate but almost equal once again be an answer? This is science fiction but it could almost be our history and yet it is a lesson for the future.
There is much food for thought running through the pages of this book. I kept asking myself, what would I have thought and how would I have reacted? Would I have felt threatened, accepting, loving? A very good read.