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| A very, very strange apocalypse. Source: Here |
“Vergil Ulam had become a god. Within his flesh he carried hundreds of billions of intelligent beings.”
What a line, eh? Always the eye-opener to get readers to read onward, but I believe it's the ideas in this book that keep people reading on.
Originally published in 1983 as a short story by Greg Egan, this story saw an expanded release in 1985. The main narrative concerns biologist Vergil Ulam who creates sentient blood cells (referred to as "noocytes"), and upon being ordered to get rid of his research by his employers he injects his creation into his own bloodstream to save it.
From there on the results get very strange indeed, with the noocytes developing sentience and beginning with rapid modification of Ulam's body; first removing his allergies and fixing his eyesight and then making him faster and stronger. At one point Ulam can even hear the noocytes in his blood as a kind of "music" (hence the title). The noocytes don't stop there - did I mention Ulam was infectious? - and are transmitted to other hosts in due course, rapidly changing and subsuming them into biomass until the North American continent suffers this fate. A classic gray goo scenario written a year before the term was coined!
The novel plays out like a Cronenberg-type horror to begin with; first on the individual level with the noocytes changing Ulam from the inside and steadily increasing in scale with all of America being reshaped by the noocytes. There's one particular scene right in the middle narrated by a news reporter flying over the country as it begins to be reshaped into something new and surreal... the imagery there is equal parts beautiful and terrifying as you begin to see the scope of this new cataclysm. The book itself is structured in several phases: interphase, anaphase, prophase, metaphase, telophase, and interphase, mirroring the phases of the cell cycle and the noocytes' alteration of humanity into something new entirely.
Yet there is no salvation from this man-wrought apocalypse, no eleventh-hour rescue. If the first half of the book concerns Ulam playing god to save his creation, then the second concerns the consequences of that decision and the people trying to survive. Taking a multiple person point-of-view, Bear does a sterling job here putting across different people's experiences in this drastically altered environment all while slowly unfurling the truth behind the noocytes' actions.
This is a book of Big Ideas: biotechnology, nanotechnology, genetic memory, and a few others central to the plot that I won't spoil are explored and it's clear that Bear knows his stuff. The argument can be made that his characters get short thrift and are just there to explore these ideas but they're the ones who carry this story; the ones who have to adapt to a rapidly changing world they can no longer understand.
Needless to say that this book hasn't aged a bit - even as one of the first science fiction books with genetic engineering as a central concern and plot driver, it feels like it could have been written yesterday. If you like big ideas taken to some terrifying extremes, I can't recommend it enough.
Originally published in 1983 as a short story by Greg Egan, this story saw an expanded release in 1985. The main narrative concerns biologist Vergil Ulam who creates sentient blood cells (referred to as "noocytes"), and upon being ordered to get rid of his research by his employers he injects his creation into his own bloodstream to save it.
From there on the results get very strange indeed, with the noocytes developing sentience and beginning with rapid modification of Ulam's body; first removing his allergies and fixing his eyesight and then making him faster and stronger. At one point Ulam can even hear the noocytes in his blood as a kind of "music" (hence the title). The noocytes don't stop there - did I mention Ulam was infectious? - and are transmitted to other hosts in due course, rapidly changing and subsuming them into biomass until the North American continent suffers this fate. A classic gray goo scenario written a year before the term was coined!
The novel plays out like a Cronenberg-type horror to begin with; first on the individual level with the noocytes changing Ulam from the inside and steadily increasing in scale with all of America being reshaped by the noocytes. There's one particular scene right in the middle narrated by a news reporter flying over the country as it begins to be reshaped into something new and surreal... the imagery there is equal parts beautiful and terrifying as you begin to see the scope of this new cataclysm. The book itself is structured in several phases: interphase, anaphase, prophase, metaphase, telophase, and interphase, mirroring the phases of the cell cycle and the noocytes' alteration of humanity into something new entirely.
Yet there is no salvation from this man-wrought apocalypse, no eleventh-hour rescue. If the first half of the book concerns Ulam playing god to save his creation, then the second concerns the consequences of that decision and the people trying to survive. Taking a multiple person point-of-view, Bear does a sterling job here putting across different people's experiences in this drastically altered environment all while slowly unfurling the truth behind the noocytes' actions.
This is a book of Big Ideas: biotechnology, nanotechnology, genetic memory, and a few others central to the plot that I won't spoil are explored and it's clear that Bear knows his stuff. The argument can be made that his characters get short thrift and are just there to explore these ideas but they're the ones who carry this story; the ones who have to adapt to a rapidly changing world they can no longer understand.
Needless to say that this book hasn't aged a bit - even as one of the first science fiction books with genetic engineering as a central concern and plot driver, it feels like it could have been written yesterday. If you like big ideas taken to some terrifying extremes, I can't recommend it enough.
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