Reading Every Book in my Late Dad's Library #9: Blood Music

I've been sitting on this one for more than a week after finishing it, because I just can't decide if I think it's one of the most original and forwards-thinking speculative novels of the 1980s, or a dull letdown. There are not just conflicting emotions in my head about this book, but two entirely opposed judgements.

Published by Greg Bear in 1985, as an expanded version of a Hugo-winning novelette from 1984 (which is why the first quarter has a noticeably different rhythm and pace from the rest of the story), Blood Music might actually be the first complete "grey goo" horror in modern fiction; it even predated Engines of Creation (non-fiction where the term was coined) by a year. Instead of beserk nanomachines consuming all biomass on the planet, however, it's intelligent, self-aware human cells, released by a rogue scientist in an unfortunate case study of the need for lab safety procedures (and ethics in research).

What follows is, from one perspective, a fairly short apocalyptic thriller, complete with your careless girlfriend, your self-isolating infected researcher, your hilbilly trucker survivors, your teenage girl, and so on. There's mounting panic, confusion, authorities acting to contain things -- but too slowly -- some international politics, and a generous dose of disgusting body horror (truly, some eldritch, depraved body horror).

Unfortunately, at this level, the characters are just not strong enough to carry the story along and it was hard not to feel disconnected from what was unfolding, like the reader was spectating from far away. The pace was so fast, that for all the bizarre imagery and alien landscapes Bear throws across the page (particular credit to the aerial view of the transformed American cities), none of them have time to breathe, so a true horror atmosphere never quite develops.

From earlier reading Forge of God, Bear does struggle at this middle level of storytelling, the part where you have to string a plot together, give it some feeling, and make the people in it sympathetic. He does it with efficiency, but not well enough to do credit to the pioneering ideas and premises he comes up with, or the deeper ideas he uses them to explore.

The idea and the themes are, as always, immaculate. One thing I appreciated in Forge of God that also crops up here is the cosmic helplessness of mankind, almost a science fiction parallel to Lovecraft: the humans in Blood Music are about as competent as you can expect. They realize what is happening and are fully capable of thinking through the implications. Apart from Vergil at the beginning, they do not make classic movie mistakes. Edward's impulsive attack on Vergil at the end of part 1 might have been the most sensible move he possibly could have made -- but it was already too late. Facing a forced evolution we cannot even comprehend, whatever we do or do not do to resist simply is not relevant.

Bear has his finger on the science discourse of the day, as always. Biotechnology was causing a buzz in the early 1980s and he was not alone in questioning its ethics and potential (the reference he makes to cellular memory goes all the way back to Frank Herbert). Like I said, Engines of Creation made waves in an adjacent field the very next year.

But the questions being asked here are penetrating to a rare degree, and Blood Music goes beyond the usual "how will we survive if our flesh turned us into sentient puddles"? From another perspective, this is a very meaningful interrogation of what it means to be conscious, and how much we have to fear from the next stage (if there is one) of our evolution. In some ways, and though ambiguously moral, it is a transhuman text. The sentient cells have no malice in them. Nothing they do to humanity is designed to cause harm, and only some of it is targeted at us at all. To the extent they interact with their hosts, it is first as an object of worship, then a physical space, then information to be encoded, then finally as a lesser to help. Blood Music is merely asking us, head-on, if we really like the look of becoming something new.

Final rating: 4/5

Let's do Ender's Game next, since, I never stop hearing about it and should probably find out what it's about.