• Darwin's Children

  • A Novel
  • By: Greg Bear
  • Narrated by: Scott Brick
  • Length: 17 hrs and 26 mins
  • 3.9 out of 5 stars (435 ratings)

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Darwin's Children  By  cover art

Darwin's Children

By: Greg Bear
Narrated by: Scott Brick
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Publisher's summary

Greg Bear’s Nebula Award-winning novel Darwin’s Radio painted a chilling portrait of humankind on the threshold of a radical leap in evolution. Now, Bear continues his provocative tale of the human race confronted by an uncertain future, where “survival of the fittest” takes on astonishing and controversial new dimensions.

Eleven years have passed since SHEVA, an ancient retrovirus, was discovered in human DNA - a retrovirus that caused mutations in the human genome and heralded the arrival of a new wave of genetically enhanced humans. Now, these changed children have reached adolescence...and face a world that is outraged about their very existence. For these special youths, possessed of remarkable, advanced traits that mark a major turning point in human development, are also ticking time bombs harboring hosts of viruses that could exterminate the "old" human race.

Fear and hatred of the virus children have made them a persecuted underclass, quarantined by the government in special “schools”, targeted by federally sanctioned bounty hunters, and demonized by hysterical segments of the population. But pockets of resistance have sprung up among those opposed to treating the children like dangerous diseases - and who fear the worst if the government’s draconian measures are carried to their extreme.

Scientists Kaye Lang and Mitch Rafelson are part of this small but determined minority. Once at the forefront of the discovery and study of the SHEVA outbreak, they now live as virtual exiles in the Virginia suburbs with their daughter, Stella - a bright, inquisitive virus child who is quickly maturing, straining to break free of the protective world her parents have built around her, and eager to seek out others of her kind.

But for all their precautions, Kaye, Mitch, and Stella have not slipped below the government's radar. The agencies fanatically devoted to segregating and controlling the new-breed children monitor their every move - watching and waiting for the opportunity to strike the next blow in their escalating war to preserve "humankind" at any cost.

©2003 Greg Bear (P)2003 Books on Tape, Inc.

Critic reviews

"Bear's sure sense of character, his fluid prose style and the fascinating culture his 'Shevite' children begin to develop all make for serious SF of the highest order." (Publishers Weekly)

"Top-shelf science fiction, thrilling and intellectually charged." (Amazon.com)

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    3 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

couldn't stand the narrator's reading

This may be a good book (Greg Bear's books usually are) but the narrator gave so many wrong and obnoxious inflections to the words and sentences, that I couldn't stand to listen to the whole thing. Odd, because I've heard Scott Brick read other books where he doesn't do this. Sad that he did here, and that the director, or producer let it go through. It ruins the book.

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars

Darwin's Children

The second part of Darwin's Radio, the book is very timely in the exploration of US Government Agency's response to new dangers real and imagined. With a hopeful message of hope that a people caught up in fear of the unknown regain their footing and return to the values of our founding fathers.

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