Book review: Blood Music

Blood Music by Greg Bear, author of the disappointing Eon. Years ago I read the back of BM, and decided not to read it. Recently, faced with someone else recommending it, and a lack of alternatives, I tried again. And the first half is fine if unexceptional, but then it goes downhill. So it goes, all too often.

The problem is what you'd expect: GB is fine describing the science-biotech interface and related matters, and weaves an interesting story around it. But once he has to try to describe what it would be like if intelligent cells existed, he fails. I think he fails pretty badly, too.

This is because... what would life be like, if you only had streams of info, rather than extracting info from sight and sound and hearing? That's effectively what life is like for these cells: they have no senses other than picking-up-information. We do have people a bit like this, those deaf and dumb and sightless, who can only read braille or equivalent. Would they, if miniaturised, somehow be good at reshaping the body they inhabit? Not obviously. Would their near-first-act be to fix something like eyesight, whose principles would be completely alien to them? Unlikely.

FWIW I think the idea of intelligent cells is doomed, from various kind of information-content type grounds, but we wave that away for the purposes of the story. Also, for some odd reason these cells are able to take skyscrapers to pieces; why exactly they are capable of chewing up steel and concrete is never mentioned or considered; it is almost as if GB, having though of these vast sheets of goo, somehow can't imagine them not able to do it. I'm also unconvinced by their structure: life is adaptable, if vast sheets of goo was a good idea, biologically, we'd see it already.

In geopolitics, with the USofA gone, the naughty Russkies get up to some nuking of various bits. GB has forgotten the submarine deterrent, which would still be fully active and quite capable of striking back; this is careless of him.

Towards the end, there is some voodoo about what-observes-the-tree-in-the-quad; the idea being that the addition of so many trillions of observers in some way strains reality, leading to some poorly-described cataclysm or singularity (TBH I'd stopped reading carefully by this point and was just skipping along desperate to get to the end; and now I'm on this there's also some voodoo about how similar capability allowed the microbes to neutralise a nuclear strike, oh yeah, that's really believeable). This has no real realation to the rest of the story (other than being necessary to explain why only the USofA rather than the rest of the world is enfolded, which in turn is necessary for drawing out the story) other than to bring it to a convenient end.

Refs

* Craig Loehle speaks.