Calling Greg Bear's Nebula Award-winning Darwin's Radio a novel--let alone a "riveting, near-future thriller," as its inside front cover proudly proclaims--is something of a misnomer. In fact, Darwin's Radio is a science article dressed up as a novel, with some forgettable characters and a lackluster plot surrounding one earth-shattering Big Idea.

Fortunately, the Big Idea is Really Big: in fact, it's so big that it explains genocide in Georgia (the country, not the state), a worldwide epidemic of miscarriages, and three frozen Neanderthal mummies. As far as I can understand it, here's the story: inside our DNA lurk forgotten sequences that in the near future begin to express themselves as viruses, transmittable from men to women. Suddenly, infected women find themselves miscarrying--but subsequent inspections reveal a second fetus, not quite human, that was implanted by the first one. At the same time, a disgraced anthropologist discovers a family of frozen Neanderthal mummies in the Alps with symptoms of the same disease. Has this epidemic already happened once before? Was it responsible for the transition between Neanderthals and modern humans? And if it was, what new breed of humans is emerging from the "infected" mothers of today?

The central idea of Darwin's Radio is genuinely fascinating. Unfortunately, it's also so complex that a good quarter of the book (including entire chapters) is filled with characters spouting essentially meaningless lines of dialogue in a desperate attempt to give non-science readers the proper background: e.g., "The SHEVA protease cleaves three novel cyclooxygenases and lipooxygenases from the [large protein complex], which then synthesize three different and unique prostaglandins." At times Darwin's Radio starts reading like a bad Russian novel, with all the ridiculously long Russian names replaced by similarly incomprehensible (and often indistinguishable) scientific terms, to equally confusing effect.

A plot exists, but only by necessity. It becomes entirely obvious after only a few chapters that the first half of the book is a vehicle for Bear to present his theory; by the end, it's apparent that the second half of the book is a vehicle for Bear to show us the world in which his theory exists. The result is a story that is, for the most part, an incredible bore. Shocking, tragic events do occur, but they occur at such a remove from the characters--and from the author--that they feel more like placemarkers denoting where in the dutifully rising action we're supposed to be. Enormous gaps of time yawn between certain chapters solely because nothing of scientific importance happens in between. True love blooms quickly in the Bear universe, if only to provide a living laboratory for Bear's speculations on human evolution by virus. And when any of these plot events threaten to intrude with the progress of scientific explanation, Bear whisks his characters off to safety, never mind that it makes no sense that they'd be any less in danger in these new places.

Of course, it hardly matters whether the characters are in danger because it's hard to sympathize with a group of people who are merely dutiful tools in a larger scheme. Bear's inability to make the reader care about his characters also makes the various threats they face inconsequential: so a character dies, I found myself thinking, Bear will surely be able to get his ideas out through another character. And he does.

To be fair, perhaps it is the subgenre of hard science fiction that simply doesn't appeal to me. While I find ideas exciting enough on their own, a 500-page novel really needs more packed into it than an interesting evolutionary theory if it wants to hold my attention. Unfortunately, Darwin's Radio has little else going for it.

Copyright © 2003 Steven Wu