Name: Darwin's Radio
Rating: 3.571428571428572 (7 reviews)
ISBN: 9780345435248

Greg Bear

A virus hunter at the Epidemic Intelligence Service has discovered that a long-dormant virus encoded in human DNA is about to re-awaken, with terrifying consequences for any woman about to have a child. Reprint.

Darwin's Radio

Tim Pendry

'Darwin's Radio' is a highly accomplished work of popular fiction, as much a scientifically-orientated political thriller as a conventional science fiction novel. It was published in 1999 as the first volume of a two-volume series when much of the gene science in it was still new and unclear. The basic premise is the triggering of our own genome's inherent endogenous retroviruses in our 'junk' DNA (or so it is claimed) to effect a somewhat traumatic 'upgrade' of our species which (it is suggested) has happened before - in the transition from the Neanderthal species to Sapiens. It picks up on theories of punctuated equilibrium, then-recent discoveries about the human genome and a claimed relationship between social stress and speciation. Whether Bear's scientific speculation is plausible over two decades later (I suspect it is not) is not really the point. The point is that Bear gives us a 'what if?' that makes us think about possible human reactions to any sudden species transformation within our own kind triggered by whatever means but especially by something that manifests itself as a public health crisis for which we are not ready. Familiar? The fact that speciation is caused here through a retrovirus and that the scientific community is not given the time to come to a fully evidence-based view of its societal implications as it spreads rapidly through the population has immediate resonance today. The film 'Outbreak' came out in 1995 (based on a novel published in 1994) and we had a recapitulation of the theme of mass viral infection in 'Contagion' in 2011 so none of what happened in the last two years should be too much of a surprise. What Bear does is shift sudden highly transmissable viral infection from being just a disease to becoming something far more transformative. In this case, it directly affects gender relations since males pass it on to females who suffer the most traumatic effects. Two separate narratives, reaction to a public health crisis and in due course to speciation and 'difference', become overlaid. We see (if not exactly aligned) some of the real world experiences of the last two years played out in imaginative fiction over two decades ago. Bear is not just good on the science (he is generally good at explaining it without slowing down the narrative although X-Ray on Kindle helps) but on the politics of academic infighting, disease control and ultimately of public order. It is a fine political thriller in that context. There are no bad guys here but there are good guys unclear about what they are dealing with doing what may be bad things in good faith simply to control the situation. This too is familiar today with governments feeling forced to take drastic actions and sections of the public resisting. There are, of course, implausible elisions of narrative to get us from A to B (which is how thrillers have to work) but not many - the whole works well within its popular fiction framework. Details of the scientific and politico-administrative narratives should not be discussed here to avoid spoilers My reaction to the book was that much of what was to happen in society because of COVID-19 may not have been predictable in the detail but was at least partly predictable in general. Our unpreparedness has less excuse if even popular fiction writers can see the trajectories. The story shifts over time from the public sphere and debate as dominant narrative to the state of affairs for a new family with a new-speciated child. The personal is central to Bear's tale centring on a particular female scientist and her emotional and sexual life. She has as foil male bureaucrats on one side and a rather hapless male anthropologist on the other who is father of the child. One flaw is that the narrative is rather summarily and unsatisfactorily resolved but it is just the first volume of two so some slack must be cut here. Bear seems highly sensitive to the woman's perspective in a story built around pregnancy, miscarriages and abortion. He has strong women playing their roles throughout. I cannot judge if he got it right here (I am a man) but it looks impressive from the outside. He is also good on complexity. I do not just mean the complexities involved in virology, genomics and so forth but also those of politics and society. Although there are some standard thriller tropes, the individuals also stand out as real people attempting to deal with something utterly new. The one false note is the insertion of a 'dreaming' narrative, not because the indigenous voice (from which it derives) does not have a right to be heard (it does) but because one of the 'scientific' characters appears to dream himself into the Neanderthal past and have it taken seriously. This adds a note of magical thinking to the science. It suggests some sort of imaginative vitalism in play and even, hidden somewhere back there, a guiding hand so that evolution gets captured for the quasi-Gaia camp far far too easily, unravelling the plausibility elsewhere. The book is a solid crowd-pleasing entertainment even if it perhaps just misses the chance to dig deeper not into the science (which is well done) but into the societal effects of the transformation ... although perhaps this comes in the second part about which I shall assume nothing here.

Darwin's Radio

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