For some time I've been looking for a copy of Blood Music because I remembered reading a good review of it years ago, and I've come to like Greg Bear. Recently I got hold of a used copy, and I wasn't disappointed. I might have been if I'd special ordered it full price.

It actually reads like two, possibly three different novellas strung together. The first is the cautionary Frankensteinesque horror story. The arrogant creator of new life is destroyed by his own creation. Which escapes.

The second is the story of the person who figures out what has happened and the risk this new life form poses to the rest of the world, and who sacrifices himself to to prevent complete disaster.

The second story is intermixed with the story of the new life itself. What might its goals and desires be? How would it effect the world around it? How would it even perceive that world and the life we know?

If anything the last, most speculative part is also the weakest part. Bear does a decent job trying to think and present the completely alien, but I kept being sidetracked by my own inability to accept the basic premise of how his micro-community gestalt mind actually functioned. Knowing *less* biology might have actually made that part easier for me.

Still an enjoyable and well written book. ( )

I first read this as a really good short story. It did not warrant the expanded version. So-so, overall.

When Genetron decides to end Vergil Ulam’s research into creating “intellectual cells” capable of learning and changing their own DNA, Vergil decides to literally take his work home with him. Although Greg Bear is best known for his science fiction, this novel crosses too many genres to be easily classified. It’s a bio-thriller, horror story, apocalyptic tale of a reckless scientist, and the creation of a new world all in one. ( )

Excellent hard SF detective story, based on nanotech dangers. ( )

Filled with speculations about genetic engineering, biological computers no bigger than human cells, and their transformation of humanity, Bear's novel does what science fiction does best: it illustrates the impact of technology on the human race. ...In Blood Music, the reader watches huiman cells become intelligent, learn to communicate with one another, teach other cells to think and "speak," and begin to remake the human bodies of their hosts into more suitable environments for themselves. -- Masterpieces of Science Fiction ( )