n the back flap of the proof dust jacket of the U.K. edition of
Greg Bear's new novel of many pages (more than 500 of them in the proof),
someone has goofed. There, in the short author bio, appears this sentence: "He
published his first science fiction story aged 16." The statement
may be true (Greg Bear started very young); the goof (as far as the
spin-doctors of HarperColllins UK must be concerned) lies in the mention
of science fiction. Nowhere else in the description of Darwin's Radio
will one find that dread phrase. The proper generic term for this book,
we learn elsewhere in the blurb, is "missing-link thriller."
This is a generic distinction which may itself seem a few links
short of a genome: but let us hope it does what one guesses must be the
job: which is to get the book racked at the front of the shop.
It deserves the push.
All the same, Darwin's Radio is a perfectly genuine SF story
grafted onto a Bestseller-Disaster-Novel Missing-Link-Thriller President-Ponders-End-of-World Sagely Tale. There
are a few moments when the graft looks as though it might not be taking,
a few dozen pages devoted too scrupulously to an almost pornographic
tracing of pheromones in the corridors of power (the sort of thing the
late Allen Drury thought [intrinsically] fascinating); but the cool clean
cognitive thrust of Bear's mind in gear tends to make pretty short work
of the smellier riffs mandatory to the form.
Stepping naked into the mind
Stripped of its protective coating, Darwin's Radio steps naked
into the mind as perhaps the sharpest and most convincing SF take on the
theory of punctuated equilibrium yet essayed. (Punctuated equilibrium,
very very briefly, is the tweak to evolutionary theory proposed by
Stephen Jay Gould and others, which argues that evolution tends to occur
in surges set in motion by various agencies, including catastrophic
events.) There are two lines of argument or investigation, each of which
very roughly correlates to the two main narrative lines governing the
shape of the first few hundred pages of the book: the dovetailing stories
of Mich Rafelson, a maverick scientist who discovers a Neanderthal
tragedy; and of Kay Lang, the establishment scientist who has predicted
the emergence of SHEVA, a retrovirus which has been part of the human
genome since before we were human, and which has been suddenly and (it
seems, devastatingly) reactivated just after the year 2000.
In the European Alps, Mich has discovered a family group: a
Neanderthal woman who has been murdered; a Neanderthal man who has died
succoring her; and a Homo sapiens infant. The infant proves to be the
genuine child of the Neanderthal couple. It is not easy either to
demonstrate this, or to force acceptance of this revolutionary (even
lurid) proof of the punctuated equilibrium theory upon a scientific world
wedded to old paradigms. There is much drama and melodrama here; Bear
keeps, as best he can given the "missing link thriller" retrovirus he has
coated his tale with in order to invade alien parts of bookshops, to the
former.
Meanwhile, Kay is forced into memories of her abortive career as
a forensic pathologist (Bear may be homaging Patricia Cornwell's Kay
Scarpella through his choice of name for his protagonist; just as he
homages E.E. Smith through the name of an off-stage philanthropic family;
the only goof in this homaging game I noted was a references to
conversations, round about the year 2000, with Björn Kurten, a speculative scientist who wrote novels about Neanderthal evolution, but who actually died in 1988). These memories assail her through her increasing involvement with SHEVA, an acronym for Scattered Human Endogenous retroVirus, "which can be transmitted laterally between individuals," and which either deforms the fetuses of pregnant women, or causes women to become pregnant with
monsters, or both. The terror is redoubled by the fact that all these
pregnancies end in miscarriages. So far.
Mutant Homo sapiens
For any SF reader, and in these latter days maybe for any reader
at all, the connection between the two strands of narrative is moderately
obvious: SHEVA is clearly the agent responsible for the mutant Homo
sapiens baby dead in the arms of its Neanderthal. For SF readers, it's
essentially the same narrative move that Arthur C. Clarke created for the
late Stanley Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey, when the monolith jerks
monkeys into wounded sapience during the prologue of the film.
So SHEVA is at work again, trying to create a new model Homo
sapiens-like creature fit to handle the new millennium. Quite
ingeniously, Bear manages both to make it utterly clear that this is the
case, and to prolong for many many pages the moment when the penny begins
to drop for others than Mich and Kay, who are sleeping together by this
point. Their sex is just about the best I've read in a decade or more of
Quantity Sex in SF Novels; Bear has an unusually acute nose for the
smells of every stage of intercourse, and is extremely sharp in his
running analysis-by-example of the relevance of the sex his protagonists
enjoy, very thoroughly, and the larger story being told.
As Darwin's Radio gallops on, we plough through (and get past)
various rote scenes: mobs panicked by the conviction that SHEVA is a tool
of Anti-Christ; ineffectual action by government agencies; wise succor
on the part of Native Americans (there's lots of succoring going on in
the book) at a moment of high risk for Kay and her infant, who (we know,
being readers of novels) will be born alive and super; quarrels and
paranoias and small triumphs and big ones.
Darwin's Radio is an exhilarating, hard-thinking, cogent book.
It reads fast. The only problem, for some readers, may be a sense that
its slingshot close, which leaves a lot hanging in the air, all too
mercilessly paves the road for a sequel.
My problem is that I'd like to read the sequel now.
John Clute is a writer, editor, critic and scholar of science fiction. He is the author of Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia and co-editor of both The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, all Hugo Award winners. He is also a co-founder of the Hugo-winning British SF publication Interzone. His criticism and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Omni, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and other places too numerous to list.
