Greg Bear (1951–2022)

This is the first science fiction novel that I have finished in what I am presuming to be my post-juvenile phase, possibly a "neophyte." Neither am I a scientist, let alone a biologist, so am unable to say anything about the hard sf conceit of this book (bio-AI nanotechnology), other than that it is a what-if question I've privately held for some time. All this is to say that I may be reaching with this review. Spoilers ahead.

To blindly proclaim a philosophical reading of Blood Music: "Nietzschean human vitality (in the strictly embodied sense) is severed from its all too human form, evolving beyond the discreteness that is the existential reality of humanity, and recapitulates all tragedy into secular apotheosis via biological singularity."

Perhaps I am only remarking upon the obvious, fundamental themes of human evolution, etc. that has inevitably arrived downstream from it's blossoming point, Nietzsche, but the metaphysics maps too cleanly not to talk about. If you know much at all about N, then you know how he feels about music, and you know how he feels about the body. Music is the will-to-power, and even Communion is only consummated by the blood and flesh of Christ. As such the noocytes are sort of these Ubermenschian meat angels who must sing, chant, and guide the humans to the great Dionysian rite at the end of the world. Vergil acts as our prophet here, symbolically acting as the pure Promethean spirit of innovation that entirely swallows up Apollonian bureacracy.

The singularity then allows humans, as we see in Bernard, to relive any part of their lives as many times as they'd like: eternal recurrence. Not exactly... eternal recurrence does not propose that we get to redo anything, only to relive, no matter how tragic. But N was chronically afflicted... would he have taken up the noocytes' bargain? A Catholic must necessarily say no, for her limits, in the Weilian sense, are the source of beauty.
We do end this book in what may be described as a transhumanist utopia. The physically impossible, logical endpoint of transhumanism as the absolute freedom of the human spirit unshackled by biology. This is also where the body horror occurs, so clearly there is some ambiguity.
Then there is the matter of racial memory, which the noocytes discover latently extant in the humans' introns. Even the reavaluation of all values is in this fleshly flat circle.
The society of cells also form a panpsychic world, a clever throughline from cell-to-human scale to noocyte-to-biosphere scale, but the question of mind here is perhaps best explored by another story. It is also remarked upon once by Vergil that he felt beckoned to create them... a thought worth tugging on.

I don't understand some of the criticism levied at Blood Music's speculation. The first part that is entirely dedicated to RNA/DNA coding is great. If we can accept that ACGT codons can be used like bytes of information, then there is no difficulty imagining that a cell can acting as a Turing complete computer, a cluster of cells can act as big data models, and spontaneous intelligence can emerge from the whole network, especially given that they have literally the entire biological history of DNA to run simulations on. In this age of ChatGPT, to have an alternative, lively depiction of AI rather than digital slop is so so refreshing. And how is it so hard to accept that the noocytes enter hyperspace? Observation does literally collapse superpositions, and we literally don't know would happen if a gajillion observations fell upon matter. In 2024, Netflix has just released an adaptation of the 3-Body-Problem and audiences do not seem to have an issue suspending their disbelief for Sophons.

Anyways, I will revisit these ideas one day when I have read more of Bear, more N, and more singularity stories to compare with (I found it funny that Suzy literally receives her own Evangelion omedetou scene). Otherwise:
- Prose is proficient. Nothing less, nothing more.
- Some characters feel inconsequential. Suzy serves her purpose as the normal but lacks motivation, though charming. Others get no ending. Love the three principal male characters though.
- I read somewhere that Orson Scott Card said Bear can't be biopunk because he's too nice to be punk. Certainly true here: every character feel like real humans and are treated quite tenderly.
- It must also be said that this is considered the first biopunk book and the first account of nanotechnology. Huge if true. Genuinely quite like Frankenstein in its ability to act as a comparison point for all further sf speculations, just without Shelley's incredible writing.
- Really enjoyed this despite the messiness.… (mehr)

Ce deuxième roman du second cycle de Fondation est, à l'inverse du premier, totalement réussi. Greg Bear reprend le style d'Isaac Asimov, crée des intrigues cohérentes avec celles du premier cycle, utilise des personnages mythiques tout en en créant de nouveaux qui ne dénotent pas de ceux créés par Isaac Asimov et enfin, l'histoire globale s'intègre très bien dans celle du cycle original. On retrouve enfin tout ce qui faisait l'intérêt des livres de Fondation, le plaisir est enfin de retour après la douleur ressentie à la lecture du premier tome. Il reste à espérer que David Brin se soit plus inspiré de Greg Bear que de Gregory Benford pour le dernier tome.… (mehr)