|
Finished Darwin's Children, by Greg Bear. It's the sequel to Darwin's Radio. Greg Bear is generally speaking an author who falls into the hard SF genre. In his books it's the cool science that is the star. The Darwin series premise is that viruses play a huge part in reproduction and in evolution. The setting is th outbreak of a new virus (SHEVA, related to HIV), that causes women to deliver children who are a new species of human. They can control their skin pigmentation and have enhanced scent glands, both issuing and sensing. Naturally, in the story, regular humans are afraid of them. At the end of Radio, the discoverer of the virus is on the run from the government with her own SHEVA child.
Children starts off with them being discovered after few years, and the child being placed into a quarantined camp for SHEVA children. All sorts of other nasty things happen. Meanwhile, the mother returns to research to try to prove that the new breed of children do not pose a health risk to humans. And the father goes back to archeology to try to find evidence of the same process spawning homo sapiens from homo erectus.
The book was rather dull. I skimmed a lot fo the details on viruses interacting with DNA. And a lot of other stuff because the characters were dull.
Don't bother to read this.
Next up, I'm reading Stiff. Beth bought me a copy.
