Blood Music

Book Review: 'Blood Music' by Greg Bear

3 / 5 Stars

Vergil Ulam is a brilliant, if socially maladjusted, scientist working at the Genetron corporation in La Jolla, California. Vergil has been doing unauthorized experiments with lymphocytes, a type of white blood cell: taking introns –lengthy stretches of ‘junk’ DNA present in every cell- and using the introns to encode information that can be processed and acted upon when injected into the lymphocytes.

When the Genetron management discovers that Vergil’s experiments are not only unauthorized, but a clear violation of NIH research regulations, they order him to stop his work and to destroy his so-called ‘noocytes’. But Vergil has no intention of stopping his work. He surreptitiously injects himself with his engineered cells and departs Genetron for unemployment benefits and a haphazard plan for the future.

But not long into his new and jobless lifestyle, Vergil notices something interesting. He has lost weight. His allergies have cleared up. His eyesight improves to the point where he no longer needs to wear contact lenses. He’s feeling fitter and healthier than he has ever felt before. He even has a girlfriend and an active romantic life. Could the noocytes in his bloodstream have somehow acted on their own to improve the health of their host ? It seems bizarre, and Vergil wonders if it’s all in his imagination..............

Greg Bear first published ‘Blood Music’ as a short story in Analog in 1983; the next year it won both Hugo and Nebula awards for best novelette. Bear expanded the story to a novel, published by Arbor House in a hardbound version in 1985; this Ace paperback (246 pp., cover art by Don Brautigam) was issued in 1986.

In my opinion ‘Blood Music’ worked better as a novelette. The new material Bear added to lengthen his narrative tends to give the second half of the book a meandering quality, as various sets of characters struggle to cope with the implications of the noocytes and the threat they present to the established order. But the novel does succeed in making the difficult transition from a narrative that starts with the small-scale events of a lab experiment gone awry, to a narrative dealing with genuinely ‘cosmic’ events, without straining scientific credibility by invoking mystical or supernatural causes.

‘Blood Music’ remains one of the more imaginative SF stories and novels to emerge from the 80s.