Blood Music
By Greg Bear.
Published in 1985.
ISBN-10: 1497637023
ISBN-13: 978-1497637023
Book cover description:
“A Childhood’s End
for the 1980s, replacing aliens and mysterious mental evolution with the
effects of genetic engineering run wild … Like Arthur Clarke, Bear goes to the
limits.” – Locus.
Vergil Ulam is a
brilliant but unorthodox researcher working to develop biochips – the next
quantum leap in computer technology, using the complexities of cellular structure
(notably DNA) as a means of information processing. But Vergil goes several
steps further, and soon has produced intelligent clumps of cellular material,
able to outperform rats in laboratory tests. In doing so, he has exceeded, without authorization, guidelines laid down for genetic research, and when he is found
out he loses his job and is told to destroy his experimental material.
Determined to salvage
something, he injects himself with part of the culture – intending to retrieve
it later – and walks out of the laboratory carrying within him a seed that will
develop far beyond the limits of his brilliant but blinkered imagination.
Based on his Hugo and
Nebula Award winning story, Blood Music is an extraordinary novel which
establishes Greg Bear among the new masters of science fiction. From its firm
grounding in current research, the novel unfolds vistas of imaginative
possibility, logical yet surprising, which demand comparison with the best of
Arthur C. Clarke, and with Olaf Stapledon.
“Only
seldom does a brilliant short story give rise to an even better novel, but in blood
Music, Greg Bear has made it happen. A dazzling flight of disciplined
imagination.” – Poul Anderson.
