Book Review: Blood Music by Greg Bear

 

 Blood Music by Greg Bear

247 pages, Paperback

Published March, 1986 by Ace

 Hugo Award Nominee for Best Novel (1986),
 Nebula Award Nominee for Best Novel (1985),
 British Science Fiction Association Award Nominee for Best Novel (1986),
 John W. Campbell Memorial Award Nominee for Best Science Fiction Novel (1986),
Prix Tour-Apollo Award (1986),
Tähtivaeltaja Award (1988)

In 2005 or so author Cody Goodfellow mentioned Blood  Music to me assuming I had read it. I had read Greg Bear. Eon, I think Darwin’s Radio. All before I tracked my reading, so it is fuzzy. Somehow despite all the award nominations and the nature of being a classic Science Fiction horror crossover I had not read it. Feeling like a poser I went the next day to the 5th ave books in San Diego, the bookstore we affectionately referred to as “the annoying guy bookstore,” and found a paperback copy of Blood Music. Good thing I rushed down there as it sat unread on my shelf for 17 years. Two weeks ago, Greg Bear’s wife Astrid announced that the award-winning author had died.  

Suddenly I felt guilty that I never took Cody’s advice, and with the passing of Greg Bear thought it was time. Bear is from here in San Diego, and even if he ended up in Seattle I think we can claim him. David Brin and Kim Stanley Robinson are connected to  UCSD but Bear has a degree across town as an Aztec at SDSU. Well I have for sure read his Star Trek and Star Wars novels, they were notable for being more SF than many of the similar books attached to the franchises. Eon is the book I have the strongest memory reading.

Now Blood Music. Is the hype real? I mean the awards are one thing, but Cody Goodfellow's recommendations are normally golden. There is only one time I can think of a book he urged me to read that I hated. Blood Music I am happy to say lives up to the hype and is all that. Bear is known for hard science so I assume that is the case with this novel which was an expansion of a novella. 

Expansions can be a mixed bag. Often the original novella or story remains the core genius, in this case, I don’t have the shorter work to compare it to. I think the novel is a masterpiece as is, but as I said I have nothing to compare it to. Blood Music is the perfect hybrid of Science Fiction and horror, mind-bending and thought-inducing creep-out that starts like a mad-scientist story and morphs into Andromeda Strain-ish end of the world…wait end of the universe tale. The world doesn’t begin to describe it.

The thinking plague was an unintentional theme back to back as I just read David Koepp’s Cold Storage. Scientific hubris is not the point of Blood Music, even though it seeds that idea with the actions of Vergil who certainly looks like a main character at the start. As he drops out of the story you might be thinking this is a case of an SF author focused on ideas that sacrifice characters.
Blood Music comes close to doing that in the sense the ideas as grand as they are will run over your memories of this book. At the moment however Bear does give attention to several characters, although no one is a true POV character. For good reason the narrative shifts often. However, even characters like the journalist introduced only in the words of his report as he flies over America has little details that give the definition to that character.
 
The thing is the ideas of this novel, the concept is just so strong no matter what Bear does to make Suzy, Virgil, or Michael Bernard live and breathe you’ll close the book and think about the nature of the universe. That is the mission of science fiction when at its best. Horror at its best does that and makes you uncomfortable about it. The thing is if you are really getting into Blood Music on a cosmic horror scale this makes you feel puny like the best of Lovecraft.

“Almost every living cell there was already a functioning computer with a huge memory? A mammalian cell had a DNA complement of several billion base pairs, each acting as a piece of information. What was reproduction, after all, but a computerized biological process of enormous complexity and reliability?”

Blood Music is about a lab scientist who is experimenting with getting the cells in living bodies to think for themselves. And when he thinks he is getting fired and cut off from his experiments he injects himself. The side effects are not that different from Brundle's in The FLY. In a typical novel this would set up an arc for Vergil, but he is catalyst and not the point. His cells, his living cells come alive in a series of creepy moments.

“Are you Stoned?”
He shook his head, then nodded once, very slowly “listening.”
“To what?”
“I don’t know. Sounds. Not sounds. Like music. The heart, all the blood vessels, the friction of the blood along the arteries, veins. Activity. Music in the blood.”

The hint of the title, normally when a character speaks the title of a story it can be corny but in this case it works. It is also a hint of the mission statement of Bear’s musing with this concept. The notion should creep out any reader. The idea is that the cells in our body could awaken and become a universe in their own right. Much has been made of how the MCU and popular media popularized the idea of multiverses but also quantum universes. Blood music expands the idea that these cells in Virgil’s body become a universe themselves.

Fantasy has often taken place in these micro-universes, my favorite being Clive Barker's Weaveworld. It is something special for a hard Science Fiction novel. Mostly Blood music hints at these huge and heady issues.

“They’re trying to understand what space is. That’s tough for them. They break distances down into concentrations of chemicals. For them, space is a range of taste intensities.”
“Maybe that’s what your machine calls infection—all the new information in my blood. Chatter. Tastes of other individuals. Peers. Superiors. Subordinates.”

Once the cells become aware they want to spread and grow. That is when the horror elements begin, the thinking plague that starts by changing and manipulating of its environment or space. Just as we have changed the earth they change Virgil. Eventually, his friend Michael isolates himself and tries to learn to communicate with the cells in his body.

“You say they are a civilization—”
“Like a thousand civilizations.”
“What am I to you?
Father/Mother/Universe
World-Challenge
Source of all
Ancient slow
*Mountain-galaxy*”

This is when the multiple points of view really help in the narrative. While we learn about the nature of the virus, we see the effects through the eyes of Suzy and April back in California. there is one outlier chapter that is really smart in the context of explaining the scale of the apocalyptic events. As told in a transcript of a news report, a European reporter flies over America. Complete to a shout-out to my homeland of Indiana.

“How do I describe the landscape beneath us. A new vocabulary, a new language, may be necessary.”  “Indianapolis is below us, and as indecipherable, as mysterious and…beautiful and alien as the other megaplexes.”

The changing landscape is the surface effect, but the reality of the universe and the cosmic issues are what really moves me. Blood Music is a classic and nominated with good reason. This book is a fantastic place to start if you want to honor the writer we just lost. I don't think it is similar to his other works but that is why it stands out. It is a fun, thought-provoking genre hybrid that questions the nature of reality. Yeah - that good.

“The human race hasn’t generated nearly the density or amount of information processing – computing, thinking, what have you – to manifest any truly obvious effects on space-time.”