ore than a decade after the events of Darwin's Radio, when millions of transhuman children were born worldwide due to exposure to a retrovirus endogenous to human DNA, the so-called Sheva children are struggling to survive. Most of these recognizably different children in the United States have been forcibly quarantined in special "schools" by the new government agency, Emergency Action, due to fears that they might endanger normal humans.
Viral biologist Kaye Lang and archaeologist Mitch Rafelson have managed to hide their 11-year-old Sheva daughter, Stella, but she is captured by a man in rural Virginia, where Stella first meets others of her kind. Mitch and Kaye rescue Stella, who has contracted an illness from one of the other children, and seek to hide out in remote Pennsylvania, where Kaye begins to experience epiphanies, which feel like wordless communications with a higher being. Emergency Action eventually tracks them down, and Stella is taken to a school in Arizona. Meanwhile, the disease has become pandemic at the special schools, killing thousands of children. Epidemiologist Christopher Dicken desperately seeks to determine its cause, and uncovers evidence of horrible government-sanctioned research on the children at the schools.
Years pass, and Stella learns more about her own species, while the school tries to educate the children to be normal. Mitch and Kaye have separated, Mitch working on an archaeological dig in Texas, Kaye doing research at her old company in Baltimore. But both are actually working, along with epidemiologist Christopher Dicken and others, to find the evidence they need to prove that Shiva has always been a natural part of human evolution and that the new children present no threat to humanity. Only though this evidence can Mitch and Kaye resolve the problems created by humanity's panic and reunite their own family.
Wondering what it means to be human
Darwin's Children is a direct sequel to the Nebula-award-winning novel Darwin's Radio, and provides a fitting continuation of that novel's story and themes. The book has many features associated with near-future disaster thrillers—fast-paced narrative, an apparent threat to all mankind, multiple characters and viewpoints, self-serving bureaucrats, duplicitous political insiders—but it is at heart and soul purely a science-fiction novel.
The novel is based on a scientific speculation that is both original and scientifically plausible—that endogenous retroviruses, now known to have contributed some of the DNA sequences in human DNA, may be one of the primary drivers of evolution, occasionally activating to create new species in a single generation. This is an extreme version of the punctuated-equilibrium concept of evolution, where species are genetically stable for long periods, then evolve rapidly over relatively short periods due to environmental changes.
What also makes this a purely SF novel is the fascinating extended glimpses we see here of the almost alien biology and culture of the new children. They have enhanced sense of smell, and can also communicate (or seek to influence others) by making odors ("scenting"). They can speak two things at once, which they call over and under speak. They can also communicate through rapidly changing colors in their cheeks. They associate into social groups called demes, which are complex peer-group families of six or more.
But the characteristic that uniquely distinguishes this as SF is that the protagonists welcome instead of fear change, while the antagonists are all xenophobes who fear change and all things alien. The heroes of this book instinctively know that the new children are a diversity to be embraced; the villains (and most of the populace) fear the new children and are eager to treat them as non-human threats to humanity. Change and diversity are almost always viewed as positive in SF stories. This viewpoint is virtually unique to science fiction, and is one of the reasons SF has become the most characteristically American literary genre.
Darwin's Children is essential reading for all SF fans, and a good bet for the major awards in the field this year.
