Ever since he published Blood Music in 1986, Greg Bear has staked
out for himself the bio-tech field as the setting for his
increasingly technical and up-to-date stories. The question
assailing science fiction writing and writers these days is whether
the rapid advances in technology are rendering their stories
obsolete before they even get to print. Vitals showcases the debate
admirably. Bear's research, his exposition and the moral dilemmas
and their implications are straight out of tomorrow's headlines.
With a focus on ageing as the final frontier Bear has tackled a
subject that is close to everyone's heart: the question of whether
humans will ever be able to achieve immortality. The book's central
premise is that ultimately humans are vast, cooperative bacterial
colonies and, handled properly, bacteria can be programmed to live
forever. Into this concoction Bear throws sibling rivalry, a
world-wide conspiracy, a doomed love affair, some low-grade
philosophising about twins, nature and immortality and more
cutting-edge bio-research than any reader can comfortably handle.
Indeed, such is the load of the latter that it's a full 90 pages
before the story gets under way and then it only manages to amble
rather than fly towards its end. Impeccably researched, with a plot
which would have Hollywood studio execs reaching for their
chequebooks, this should have been a book which leaves the reader
with a wild buzz of excitement about what lies ahead. That this
does not happen is entirely due to the cast of characters and their
interaction. Bear's heroes come across as two-dimensional
scientists and cardboard-thin stock figures, their motivation as
suspect as their dialogue. The science may be spot on but it is
ultimately the characters and their story that seduce the reader
into suspending their disbelief and entering a book's world. Bear
sets himself an ambitious task and then fails to bring it off. Let
us hope that in future offerings he will manage to get back on
track and write the kind of book that built his reputation again.
(Kirkus UK)
Scientist Hal Cousins is close to discovering the key to
immortality but someone has already found it and will kill him to
keep it secret. Vitals is a tense technothriller in the best
Michael Crichton tradition. A mile and a half below the surface of
the Pacific Ocean, scientist Hal Cousins, frightened of the dark
and no friend of God, is looking for the fountain of youth. The
Nobel Prize doesn't interest him. Hal is in longevity research for
the long haul, the really long haul. 'Angels' (rich businessmen
keen to live a thousand years) fund him. Hal finds what he is
searching for: xenos, the single-celled tramps of the sea floor,
each one as big as a clenched fist. But then the pilot of his sub
goes berserk. Hal barely survives; the xenos don't. The pilot kills
himself. Five other scientists in related fields die violently in
the space of a week. Hal discovers a trail of death stretching back
over decades, from Stalin's Russia to present-day Manhattan.
Another epidemic of murder by superbly trained killers has been
triggered by what Hal nearly discovered... From the bottom of
Russia's Lake Baikal to a billionaire's bionic house built into the
cliffs of the Californian seashore, from the darkest days of the
reign of Joseph Stalin in Russia to the capitalist free-for-all of
modern America, the edge of immortality is the most dangerous place
to be.
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