2000 Nebula – DARWIN’S RADIO by Greg Bear

Greg Bear becomes the second author to win two novel Nebulas without having won any novel Hugos. Samuel Delaney was the first, and he makes a lot of sense. He was the New Waviest of the New Wave, who won at a point when Hugo was still handing statuettes to old schoolers like Heinlein. I think Bear’s success demonstrates how the Nebulas have changed. They’ve moved from rewarding “writers’ writers” of edgy sf and begun to favor character-based works that are light on the sf. In the ‘90s at least, I think they’re so focused on expanding the definition of science fiction, that they haven’t always been recognizing the best works. Of course, the big science fiction successes of the ‘90s (neither of which make an appearance on my masterlist of award winners for this blog) are The X-Files and the works of Michael Crichton, and, as in Robert Sawyer’s Terminal Experiment, that’s the model we’re working with here.

Darwin’s Radio has a fantastic pair of opening sequences. Anthropologist Mitch Rafelson discovers an unusual pair of mummified Neanderthals amidst a thrilling climb in the Alps. Evolutionary biologist Kaye Lang investigates a mass grave in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia. Both of these discoveries (whose simultaneity is only extremely contrived) connect to an emerging epidemic of a miscarriage-causing virus called SHEVA. Mitch and Kaye both come to the conclusion that this virus, which has emerged from non-coding remnants of ancient viruses locked in our DNA*, is actually prompting a rapid evolution in the human genome. Then the government chases them.

I had two major problems with this novel. First of all, it’s a novel about scientific ethics that is entirely without an ethical center. Mitch hates that he has to respect Native American interests under NAGPRA when dealing with ancient remains. Kay’s instincts tell her that her baby will be okay, so she shouldn't submit to the epidemic-fearing CDC, who are portrayed as tyrants for trying to halt the spread of what looks like a deadly virus. The day after pill is….something. Patenting parts of the genome is right, unless it’s wrong? Bear seems confused about those last two. At the end of the day, the novel is not about creating a reasonable ethical framework to deal with a novel problem (which could have been exciting to read about), it uses ethics to create artificial conflict. The final arbiter of right and wrong comes down to Bear’s protagonists: if they believe it, it’s probably right. If the smarmy, interfering government antagonists believe it, it’s wrong.

An even bigger problem is that I just didn’t enjoy the novel. It moved slowly and focused on the characters’ miserable lives. I went to the novel’s Wikipedia article to double-check the spellings of the characters names, and I found a fairly detailed summary that manages to go on for three paragraphs without mentioning any characters. That’s kind of telling. It’s not that Bear doesn’t spend time on the characters; as in Benford’s Timescape or Sawyer’s Terminal Experiment, most of the novel is spent on detailing their tawdry lives and petty politics. But, if the Wikipedia author is anything like me, she didn’t care about or like the characters, so I don’t blame her for skipping them and sticking with describing the book’s fake science.

The most interesting part of this novel for me was the question of what would emerge from this evolutionary infection. Turns out that I have to read another book called Darwin’s Children to get into that. After this one, I’m not gonna, especially since the last few pages were rather discouraging on that front. Communication by scent? Didn’t our ancestors drop that trait several millions of years ago?

My ‘90s recap is up next, and I predict that I’m going to say mean things about the state of the Nebula awards in this decade.

*These remnants really do exist; the rest of the science in the novel felt like pure bs. Bear needlessly complicates evolutionary theory to a ridiculous degree. You’d think genes as a networked intelligence might be an interesting concept. Here, unfortunately, it is not.

Grade: D+

1994 Nebula – MOVING MARS by Greg Bear

What was it about Mars and science fiction in the early nineties? On top of this work and Robinson’s Mars Trilogy, Ben Bova also had a novel about Martian settlement, titled, simply, Mars. Maybe there was a sense that we were only a generation or so away from a manned mission to the red planet….which we still seem to be. This novel really isn’t about Mars though, which is one of its problems.

The novel is narrated by Casseia Majumdar, a woman raised on Mars in the twenty-second century. In fact, we soon learn that the novel is an autobiography of sorts. A group of independent corporate entities called BMs run various portions of Mars, but different factions make efforts to create a united government by alliance or coercion. The novel begins with Casseia as a college student, rebelling against one of these efforts, but she eventually works her way into a united government. The biggest issue for Mars is independence from Earth, which is populous, technologically advanced, rich, and powerful. Artificial intelligences called "thinkers" are common there, as is nanotechnology, and most humans have enhanced themselves with these technologies. Casseia works to prevent Earth from overwhelming Mars, and she is close to a brilliant young man named Charles Franklin, who makes breakthroughs that could help achieve this goal.

This is my second encounter with Greg Bear – I’ve also read the novella version of Blood Music – and it seems that his strength lies in imagining new technologies and considering their implications. That’s science fiction at its most basic. He does a great job with it for most of this novel…with one big exception. Unfortunately, that exception becomes the crux of the book, and everything else in the novel really exists to serve this one idea. Without giving anything away (though the title is a big hint), I’ll say that the deck is stacked in both interplanetary politics and interpersonal relationships so that this new super-technology will be used, despite some of its more terrifying implications. In the end, this is no longer a story about Mars, or even about Casseia, though she’s always at the center of things, it’s about this new tech. Worse still, the technology opens up some very interesting doors, but Bear wants to tell the story of its utilization, and is more or less willing to stop there. I’m a lot more interested in how this technology will be used fifty or a hundred years after the novel’s end.

That said, the novel has a lot going for it. Casseia is a strong female character with complex emotions. She’s that rare character in science fiction – she’s smart and likable, but she makes mistakes, and she has weaknesses. She’s not an anti-hero or a Mary Sue; she feels like an actual human being, and that’s nice to see. The scenes on Earth and the depiction of its technologically driven youth culture are also quite well-rendered, as are scenes of fossil-hunting for Martian

life.

But, the depiction of Mars itself fell flat, especially in comparison to Robinson’s work, and it was in the lead-up to the increasingly inexorable climax that the novel lost much of its appeal.

Grade: B-