The first third of this 1985 biotech thriller is palatable. A crazed and self-obsessed, loner scientist (you know the guy) “goes rogue” within his biotech company and does some gene-altering experiments on his own (at night, I guess? There are no supervisors at this company and an awful lot of free time). His secret work is discovered and he is ordered by an incurious boss to destroy everything – notebooks, samples, reagents, all under a watchful eye. He injects himself with his experimental biological culture to smuggle it out of the lab.
The settings and plot devices are cliché. The characters are stereotypes, the relationships Kabuki. The writing is clunky, especially the pages of pointless dialog. None of it is believable. Still, this is sci-fi, so we must hitch our disbelief to the main theme – rogue biotech scientist.
In classic Jekyll and Hyde tradition, the injection transforms the scientist into a kind of monster. The variation here is that the modified “lymphocytes” he injected become conscious and even linguistic, speaking (or singing) to him as voices in his head. How spontaneous consciousness might arise is not explained. Where lymphocytes would learn grammar is elided. An explanation of how serological cells could communicate with their human host by telepathy is, wisely, not even attempted.
It’s pure fantasyland. I’m not sure why this story counts as sci-fi. Where is the “sci?” It must be the glassware. If you have a laboratory with glassware, that’s science. As for psychological exploration (the essence of “psi-fi,”) it is absent. The characters lack psychological interiority, except for the “noocytes,” (the magic bugs), who appear in sentence fragments that have no relationship to the science of developmental psycholinguistics.
The story could have been grounded in biological ideas of the time, and that’s why I picked it up. In 1976, Richard Dawkins published The Selfish Gene, which argued that animals are merely vehicles for the genes, which are on their own evolutionary journey. The animal’s job is simply to reproduce in service to the genes. That idea was exciting at the time because it reversed figure and ground. We think we’re in charge of our lives, but actually the genes are our puppet-masters.
Instead of exploring Dawkins’s speculation, Bear turns it into literal biological detail: the intelligent lymphocytes grow inside the hero, eventually taking over his agency and his life, then spread like a pandemic around the globe. I found this literalism heavy-handed, unrealistic, unnecessary, and a missed opportunity to riff on causality, agency, evolution, and many other interesting themes.
When the story ends, there is no point, no moral, no epiphany, no resolution. A sci-fi masterpiece? Depends on your standards. Bear is a “big-name” sci-fi writer who has been called heir-apparent to Arthur C. Clarke. He has millions of delighted fans. This is the only Bear book I’ve been able to finish. I must conclude that he writes a particular kind of sci-fi that is simply not my cup of tea.
Bear, Greg (1985). Blood Music. New York: Open Road Integrated Media. 276 pp.