I’ve now got a few of these book view things to catch up on so I’ll start with some thoughts on Greg Bear’s novel Blood Music which I kept seeing in lists of classic sci-fi novels. As the recommendations always seemed very positive I figured I’d better read it myself. This turned out to be a pretty good decision.
The story takes the idea of biotechnology running amok as its main theme and is set kind of in the present-ish. Vergil Ulam’s employer grows worried about the dangerous potential of his experimentation with biological machines and decides that the work must be destroyed. Ulam has too much invested in what he has achieved and, in a panic to preserve his creation, injects himself with a solution containing some of the machines which he has dubbed “noocytes”. His intention is to recover them later and resume his work but this plan goes awry and events soon take a turn for the worse.
Or perhaps the better?
Conditions within Ulam are just right for the noocytes to replicate and evolve. As awareness dawns they begin to make subtle alterations to Ulam’s physiology correcting defects, implementing improvements. Soon they are on the move as Ulam’s contacts with other people allows his “infection” to be transmitted.
It is difficult to add more without giving too much of the story away, so I’ll close by saying that what follows is a thought-provoking and at times nightmarish vision of a world where a scientific leap made with the best of intentions leads to dramatically unexpected consequences. Perhaps there are some places that we should not allow science and technology to take us?
Does Blood Music live up to that tag of classic sci-fi with which I had seen it so widely associated? On balance it does, being a well written exploration of the unknowable results of biological tinkering.