Greg Bear has been one of those science-fiction greats whose work I’ve always put off reading and I felt vaguely guilty about it when he passed away in 2022. I only got around to it when I saw Blood Music being listed among the greatest novels in the genre ever written. My first impression here is that Bear certainly is an author who knows a lot about biology and even though this was written in 1985, it still feels up to date and modern. However I’m not sure I care much for the plot, such as it were. I was amused when I checked the Wikipedia entry for this book and saw someone comparing the ending to Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End because that was where my mind went to as well.

Scientist Vergil Ulam is supposed to work on the exciting new technology of biological chips for his employer. In secret however, he creates an even more revolutionary advance: thinking biological computers that are engineered from his own lymphocytes. When his employers discover that he has been doing unvetted research, he is fired and desperate to sneak his work out of the lab, injects the modified lymphocytes back into his own body. There they multiply and become a self-aware civilization in their own right. Calling them noocytes, Vergil initially experiences many benefits as his body changes, boosting his health and sex drive. He asks a friend from college who is now a doctor to examine him and they learn that his body is further changing in many radical ways. His friend realizes the threat of all life on Earth and becomes fearful. Meanwhile Bernard, a celebrity scientist brought in by his employer to help them launch their IPO also realizes that it’s too late to stop the plague and flies himself to Europe under strict containment protocols to let himself be used as a test subject. Yet even as the noocytes spread across North America, some mysteriously remain unchanged and are left wandering around in confusion at the changed world around them.

This book was a mixed bag for me as there are some parts that I really liked and some parts that left me wondering what’s the point of including them. I’m not certain what sort of real world credentials Bear had, but his account of how a corporate-run laboratory is run sounds plausible to me. It would have been stereotypical to portray the biotech startup Vergil works for as being responsible for the outbreak due to their greed. Instead however they are appropriately cautious. They seek technological innovation but not too much of it because they want to avoid public controversy and want to gain government approval. Vergil may have been an idiot about safety protocols but the details of the containment procedures Bernard takes on his own initiative are impressive including setting fire on his personal private jet. The central premise of the noocytes becoming intelligent and for a time treating the insides of Vergil’s body as their entire universe is of course mind bending and original. The point is well made that the scale of human beings to the stars is comparable to that of the noocytes and the human body as a whole.

Yet the book is far more ambitious than even that. It’s not just that that the noocytes are a much more intelligent species than humanity. Bear goes on to explore how the sheer density of thought they enable changes the very structure of reality. It’s far out stuff but it also comes at the expense of more prosaic concerns. One character in the novel observes that the noocytes are seemingly benevolent but speculates that surely they must still have some structure and hierarchy within their society and some means to agree on and enforce some set of values. These questions are never answered. To those who remain human, the noocytes are simply mysterious and unknowable. I’m not a fan either of the scenes showing the perspective of ordinary people who have no idea what is going on in the wider world. These have a post-apocalyptic feeling which might have been interesting at the time but we’ve seen enough of them in films and television since. Bear even uses some characters who are undereducated or mentally slow to further highlight how bewildered they are by the changed world around them but I would much rather read about the opinions of the people who are smart and curious. I suppose that’s why I love the writing of Greg Egan so much, since every single one of his characters have scientist-levels of reasoning abilities even if it isn’t realistic.

Due to these and other choices Bear makes, I have serious problems with the pacing of the book. For example at one point, there’s quite a bit of detail about how the noocytes are optimizing Vergil’s body and turning him into a kind of sex god. This suggests an entirely different type of novel. It’s not ideal but I can work with it. But very quickly after that, it switches modes to an end of the world scenario and then switches modes again. It wants to explore amazing ideas, but it’s so inconsistent about the depth it goes into. The details about how a rogue scientist could have come up with the noocytes in a corporate laboratory are relevant and plausible. But there are also so many pages devoted to the survivors of the plague in an after the end of the world scenario that shouldn’t really be the point. That makes the leap to what we would today call an ascension ending even more abrupt. Like I said, it reminded me not only of Childhood’s End but also Pantheon that we’d watched only recently. I do need to read more of Bear’s work as I recognize his vision and imagination but I don’t think I’m a fan.