Declare Books Supposing Blood Music
| Original Title: | Blood Music |
| ISBN: | 1596871067 (ISBN13: 9781596871069) |
| Edition Language: | English |
| Literary Awards: | Hugo Award Nominee for Best Novel (1986), Nebula Award Nominee for Best Novel (1985), British Science Fiction Association Award Nominee for Best Novel (1986), John W. Campbell Memorial Award Nominee for Best Science Fiction Novel (1986), Prix Tour-Apollo Award (1986) Tähtivaeltaja Award (1988) |
Greg Bear
Paperback | Pages: 344 pages Rating: 3.81 | 10314 Users | 518 Reviews
Describe Regarding Books Blood Music
| Title | : | Blood Music |
| Author | : | Greg Bear |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | Anniversary Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 344 pages |
| Published | : | September 1st 2005 by iBooks (first published April 1st 1985) |
| Categories | : | Science Fiction. Fiction |
Representaion As Books Blood Music
I HAVE BEEN TOLD THIS REVIEW IS SPOILERY!! BEWARE!!(dude, you seriously want an audio version of this??)
so i read this because bird-brian told me to.
i don't know that i am the best person to review sci-fi books. i have zero background in the genre, but for whatever reason, brian thought it would be amusing if i reviewed this.
so i will try.
soooo - okay - quick plot for you plotty folks out there - genius bad boy scientist gets fired from job for meddling with mammalian cells and conducting experiments outside of his job description. before he gets booted to the curb with his cardboard box, he surreptitiously injects many of his little cells into his own body so he can continue his experiments in the privacy of his own home.
oops.
once inside his body, they start housekeeping a little. they are like sentient little roombas, fixing his allergies and his eyesight - gentrifying his insides so the nice noocytes can move in and go condo. they make it all better, like when my super put potted plants in my foyer. suddenly, he is stronger and thinner and he can have sexual intercourse FOUR times in a single evening with a girl who approaches him in a bar and then moves in!! he is like jeff goldblum in the fly - he is better than human; he contains multitudes!! and they communicate with him in his miiiind!! but then, much like poor jeff goldblum, he begins to deteriorate. but in this book, he takes everyone with him.
and the world goes ffwwoosshh.
and that's when it gets a little "huh?" for me.
so north america is pretty much gone. people turn into like jello?? and so this "slow" girl survives. why?? no one knows - i guess she is the only sped in north america and the noocytes can't be bothered fixing her, and then the mother of the now-gelatinized bad boy scientist - she survives because... yeah, well no one knows, and then twin brothers (eeeek) survive because they have a lot of pesticide-exposure?? okay, i can buy that. and then the twins meet up with old science-mama as they flee the rapidly-changing landscape?? sure, makes sense - the USA is not that big after all.
but slow girl goes to live in the world trade center (i pour out my 40-ounce) where she is visited by three ghosts who bring her food and... yeah, i don't understand any of this part.
again - i don't read a lot of sci-fi. is it traditional in sci-fi that the sci- takes over the more traditional elements of storytelling like characterization?? or is this more of a criticism of a particular kind of science fiction from a particular time (the eighties). because these characters were pretty one-dimensional. and there isn't really a main character because the one you assume will be the main character knocks off pretty quickly... as do the rest...it reminded me a lot of on the beach, which book seemed so unrealistic to me in the way that people just quietly accepted their fate without changing their day-to-day routines... dummies.
i have to confess - i have no idea what happened in the post-noocyte takeover of north america. why there were four people left knocking around the whole fucking continent - what their stories were meant to contribute to the greater story - i am at a loss here, guys...
i am also at a loss here:
"first you need to find a length of viral DNA that codes for topoisomerases and gyrases. you attach this segment to your target DNA and make it easier to lower the linking number - to negatively supercoil your target molecule. i used ethidium in some earlier experiments..."
*zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz*
"what you want is to add and subtract lengths of input DNA easily, and the feedback enzyme arrangement does this. when the feedback enzyme is in place, the molecule will open itself up for transcription much more easily, and more rapidly. your program will be transcribed onto two strings of RNA. one of the RNA strings will go to a reader - a ribosome - for translation into a protein. initially, the first RNA will carry a simple start-up code"
sorry, i totally drifted off there, greg bear.
(greg bear also wrote the book moving mars which greg stahl is always talking about. we saw it yesterday during our bookstore jaunting. this is an aside)
i don't know... i don't know where this falls in the greater scheme of science fiction, or what i am supposed to have gotten out of it all. i assume it is a cautionary tale about not taking your work home with you, right?? (although if i ever get fired, i am going to inject SO MANY books under my skin so i can read them when i get home. oh god if i got fired, i would have so much free time... kind of tempting...) and the more likely cold-war stuff, but that part is less fun and more blowy-uppy.
i did learn that greg bear likes the word "cocantenations" as much as proust.
and that's all i got.
oh, i almost forgot my most favorite bit of dialogue:
"i'll never be rid of you," bernard said. "you always represented something important to me." she swiveled on her high heels and presented the rear of an immaculately tailored blue suit. he grabbed her arm none too gently and brought her around to face him. "you were my last chance at being normal. i'll never love another woman like i did you. you burned. i'll like women, but i'll never commit to them; i'll never be naive with them."
hahahahahaha
come to my blog!Rating Regarding Books Blood Music
Ratings: 3.81 From 10314 Users | 518 ReviewsComment On Regarding Books Blood Music
starts out a pretty run-of-the-mill Michael Crichton-type thriller, then segues into a cronenbergian fly-like body-horror thing and then ends as a stephen king The Stand-type situation, with a bunch of characters wandering around in a post-apocalyptic wasteland (only the characters are really flat and none of them were there at the start and you don't care about any of them and... whatever). BUT! right in the middle, there's this one amazing chapter! narrated by a news reporter in a plane flyingGreg Bear once said "science fiction works best when it stimulates debate" and I couldn't agree more. Before this Frankensteinian adventure, I'd never read a book by him and I'm feeling like I am definitely missing out. I seriously enjoyed the language he uses. My interest waned about 70% in but I stuck in there and ended up loving the last 10 or so pages. Overall, I'd say it had a strong finish and in the end it made me think. Sure, there were a few outdated pieces. A majority of one
This novel really irked me, for several reasons. I think my primary complaint is in the characters - they were undeveloped, unrealistic, and clearly vessels for the science and story rather than dynamic individuals. I didn't care about any of them, except for maybe the intelligent cells themselves.It didn't help that the plot was slow-moving and required a lot of suspension of disbelief. I don't know enough about hard science to judge the likelihood of any of this novel's events, but from a
I had no idea this book was going to be so weird! I guess the name and cover should have given me a hint, but I try to practice the "Don't judge a book by its cover" rule. The protagonist is an interesting fellow, a sloppy research doctor. Working in the area of microbiology. Aspersions of greater things and a drive to achieve but he just isn't that careful in the lab. A germ with intelligence.... That's all I'm saying; it just gets weirder after that. It is a good, imaginative science fiction
At a certain point, I had to admit that Blood Music ceased to be about science-y horror stuff, and just became a wild, sci-fi horror novel. And while I liked that, I sort of missed the science part. And the aspects that actually related to being human, and why that's important. A lot of that appears to just drop away in the end (which is fairly abrupt).For some reason (gee - the cover? the synopsis?), I'd had this impression that the book was going to be about crazy Cthulu monsters. What a let
Storyline: 3/5Characters: 3/5Writing Style: 3/5World: 3/5The last epidemilogical hard science fiction book I read was......also written by Greg Bear! Blood Music shared a lot with the Darwin's Radio duology. And when I say, "a lot" I mean the same subgenre, the same general plot structure, more or less the same problem to understand and respond to, and mostly the same types of characters. I did wonder though if I was being too critical. Perhaps some who read military space science fiction novels
I read this book as a teenager, when it first came out, and I remember loving it. Rereading it now, 30 years later, it's good, but not great. It deserves full credit for being an early work to focus on the idea of an intelligent virus transforming humanity. And it's not the book's fault that the scenes where the Soviet Union is the big scary villain come off now as dated.That said, the pacing of the book is odd. The first half focuses on a handful of characters, of whom only the protagonist
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