I
found Darwin’s Radio to be an enjoyable story which has the reader
supporting common sense and the underdog against humanities’ usual
instinctive reaction of kill first and ask questions later. With the work
on the human genome project providing a deeper understanding of human
evolution, Bear has managed to convincingly merge current understanding
with a seemingly plausible fast track evolutionary mechanism. Whether his
scientific techno-babble would stand up to the scrutiny of a geneticist
remains to be seen, but it sounded reasonable to me.
The book starts with the discovery of a mass grave of mutated villagers
in the Caucasus; a mummified prehistoric family revealed by ice-thaw high
in the Alps; and a mysterious new ‘disease’ that strikes only pregnant
women, resulting in miscarriage. However the women who miscarry become
spontaneously pregnant again without sexual activity. And the resulting
babies are not normal.
The author details the predictable xenophobic reaction. The World’s
governments enact emergency measures: segregation of the sexes, abortion
of all foetuses. But is it a killer plague or is it something else? It is
left to the three scientist hero(ine)s to ‘save’ the day. There is a
famous biologist, Kaye Lang. A disgraced paleontologist Mitch Rafelson and
the U.S. government’s ‘virus hunter’ Christopher Dicken. And their
task is to overcome mass panic and superstition and convince everyone that
the so-called junk genes that have slept in our DNA for millions of years
are waking up.
As the New Scientist describes it, "Darwin’s Radio is a tense
techno-thriller in the Michael Crichton vein … there are riots, flights
to the hills, death cults, martial law, and superstitious fear".
Darwin’s Radio is a ‘hard science’ science fiction novel set in the
near future, and is to be recommended.