Dorris Lessing recommended this in an interview as one of her favorite sci fi reads so I thought I'd give it a whirl. I was groaning through the initial pages of typical adolescent fantasy crap: Allergy prone, four-eyed, socially inept (yet brilliant!) nerd transforms into super-being via laboratory shenanigans, but then the story turned into something much more interesting. If you are like me, bored to death by most sci fi, this one might be worth trying out. ( )

A thrilling, scary tale about the 'hidden messages' in our DNA, and what they might become if we let them loose! Sort of a bio/techno thriller, written before that sort of thing became popular. ( )

Unusual. All the way through this I had the odd sensation that I'd read it or something very similar before. It never came to me what it was.

The basic premise is something that has definetly been the subject of many novels, but Bear writing in the 80s will have been at the forefront. It has taken a couple of decades for the biotech industry to reach the prevalence in understanding it now holds. This unfortunately means we understand a lot more than we did then, and many of concepts are now out-of-date or just downright impossible. Also seriously dating the novel is the computer technology. Considering it was published '85, Bear did quite well at predicting it's widespread uptake in laboratories et al, but the continued references to VDTs (presumably Visual Display Terminals) grates every single time.

Virgil Ulam is your almost stereotypical mad scientist, poor social skills, but technically brilliant. As a sideline to the work he's supposed to be doing for a new BioTech start-up (also a very good prescience from the 80s), he starts looking at introns (non replicating parts of DNA) within simple cells. He manages to get them to replicate, massively increasing the information storage and hence processing capabilities of the cells (this is the bit that's completely impossible) He know's he has suceeded in doing this because they can run mazes just like lab rats. Being a mad scientist however means that he isn't that hot on security, and so he gets found out. Just before he gets canned, he takes the desperate step of injecting hmself with his 'clever' cell lines. Secure in the knoweldge that only he understands, he knows he has a couple of weeks to find an new job in another lab where he can continue to work on the cells. After all they're only cells like any other in his body, and what harm could it do?

The rest of the book covers the details of precisely what the consequences can be of not knowing what you are doing. As seen by the very few survivors who happen to be genetically compatible. Annoyingly the tale form his mother's POV is left incomplete.

I don't think this is an anti-GM creed in the way that Jurrasic Park might be, but the basic message - Be extremely careful if you don't fully understand what it is you are experimenting with - remains the same. The actual technological suggestions aren't to be taken seriously, the consequences are.

Bear doesn't write the most empathic characters going, he is much more ideas orientated, and as such this isn't a particularly gripping novel. But it's readable enough and even though badly dated at times the background principles remain awe inspiring. ( )

What an amazing read! The ideas were vividly brought to life and I couldn't put it down. Horrifyingly creepy in parts, and clever, very clever. I'm not quite sure what happened at the end, but it didn't matter. Brilliant. ( )

It is difficult to put into words why I like this book so much. I’ve read it probably 6 or 7 times and I’m still fascinated with the concept of high intelligence at the micro-scale. Yes, it is perhaps too long and quite choppy, but I can forgive that because the ideas in this book are so intriguing. Plus George Guidall’s voice in narration is gentle and dreamlike; adding to the nirvana-like concept of the Noo-Sphere and the Thought Universe. Tantalizing.

Like other good science thriller writers, Bear gives us an explanation of the mechanics underlying his story. I both understood it and took it as read; not being a scientist myself I can’t easily verify whether what he says is true. Basically it sounded plausible and so I could go with it as the basis of the novel; that is that the scientist Ulam in working with the natural mechanics of information exchange among cells, accidentally engineered learning cells, which evolved into sentient, intelligent cells. Not so scary until it is explained that they still work like cells; that is in groups. Now we have groups of intelligent cells running amok in the human body.

Eventually they figure out how to overcome the rejection syndrome when moving to another human and they spread. They are explorers and consider Ulum and other early hosts as godlike beings. They have no concept of the macro scale, but when they do get it, they bide their time and continue to learn.

It seems to me that because of their co-dependent nature they aren’t subject to the same selfish aggression that humans are. Their very natures are rooted in cooperation and co-existence; like the Borg the concept of the individual is difficult for them to understand. Through interaction as peers with their hosts Ulam and Bernard, they realize more and more about what it is to be human and Bernard experiences not only his own memories, but those of others. This is accomplished through something like mitochondrial DNA; a structure within cells that encodes for memory and serves as a long-term storage vault through generations of people. Racial memory for lack of a better term, only it is stored at a cellular level and can be reproduced and replayed; experienced by others.

The original story (which I’ve only read once) is more of a cautionary tale a la Frankenstein; casting the scientist as arrogant, irresponsible and destructive. The novel only starts out that way when the changes to humans in the story are thought to be a disease. The “plague” quickly turns to something else in my mind; a salvation. Humanity will surely destroy itself one day, but preserving ourselves (encoding ourselves) as noocytes gives us immortality of a sense. Basically the story changes to one of the next stage in human evolution. A topic Bear seems to like.

Eventually every human loses its macro scale and becomes literally dissolved into a mass of living “tissue”. Certain portions of a person’s brain are encoded to retain the whole of the personality, memories, knowledge and experiences. The rest of the body is taken as general building material for this new micro-scale world. The parts that are fully developed noocytes continue to think, feel and become part of the whole; working with peer cell groups from other people. It’s as if all of humanity has become one gigantic organism. Of course the cells encoded with individual personalities continue to change and one can meet up with a version of oneself; one changed and evolved, but yet still containing the essential personality of the original person. It’s all very idealistic and dreamlike.

Many hard core science fiction fans hate this idea and would have liked Bear to keep to known territory; the sacred state of humanity and the preservation there of. Some even liken this to a fascist attempt at racial cleansing; to get rid of the old, the ugly, the mentally challenged etc. Bear never goes there though. He wonders at it through a character; are the bad and defective people integrated as well as the geniuses, or are they deleted or altered to shed their negative characteristics? Another character’s relatives explain it to one not immediately assimilated by saying that they ‘fix’ people. And they do, but do they delete people who don’t meet some kind of standard? We readers never know, but we can speculate.

The upshot of so many billions of trillions of intelligent beings concentrated in such a small space is the observer effect. That is the premise that mere observation and/or measurement of a phenomenon will affect it in some way. Any set of closely observed phenomena will change and too much change upsets the balance of the physics of the universe. Then the question; does the universe set the mind’s direction or does the mind set the universe’s direction? Bear doesn’t answer because he can’t. We’re left to wonder about it.

And a good deal more. One problem of this novel is that of characters created, fussed over and then dropped completely without resolution. He does the same with some ideas and concepts. I would have liked more resolution if only to bring the story to a close, if not to answer scientific queries. Once the noocytes return, what happens? We’re left with a dream-like vignette of Bernard and his first girlfriend and their first date. In actuality, they never had a second and he’s regretted it all his life. Now encoded into the Thought Universe, he has reconnected with the encoded version of this woman and some of each part of them can relive and redirect the past in a new future. All very idealistic and sort of clangs against the hard science of what came before it. I love the idea of it and I think Bear did, too, but it seems he came to it late in the writing of the novel and I think he should have gone back and modified the spirit and execution of the first parts of the story to check up with his change of plans. He also could have killed some story lines that went nowhere, too. It makes for a messy, but strangely satisfying package. ( )