Tuesday, August 20, 2024

Recommended reading - Blood Music, by Greg Bear (1985)


Blood Music
by Greg Bear (1985)
 
ISBN-10: 1497637023
ISBN-13: 978-1497637023
 
Book cover description:
 
“A Childhood’s End for the 1980s, replacing aliens and mysterious mental evolution with the effects of genetic engineering run wild … Like Arthur Clarke, Bear goes to the limits.” – Locus.
 
Vergil Ulam is a brilliant but unorthodox researcher working to develop biochips – the next quantum leap in computer technology, using the complexities of cellular structure (notably DNA) as a means of information processing. But Vergil goes several steps further, and soon has produced intelligent clumps of cellular material, able to outperform rats in laboratory tests. In doing so, he has exceeded, without authorization, guidelines laid down for genetic research, and when he is found out he loses his job and is told to destroy his experimental material.
 
Determined to salvage something, he injects himself with part of the culture – intending to retrieve it later – and walks out of the laboratory carrying within him a seed that will develop far beyond the limits of his brilliant but blinkered imagination.
 
Based on his Hugo and Nebula Award winning story, Blood Music is an extraordinary novel which establishes Greg Bear among the new masters of science fiction. From its firm grounding in current research, the novel unfolds vistas of imaginative possibility, logical yet surprising, which demand comparison with the best of Arthur C. Clarke, and with Olaf Stapledon.
 
“Only seldom does a brilliant short story give rise to an even better novel, but in blood Music, Greg Bear has made it happen. A dazzling flight of disciplined imagination.” – Poul Anderson.


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