Darwin's Radio

By: Greg Bear

Narrated by: George Guidall

Length: 17 hrs and 14 mins

Publisher's summary

Greg Bear's fiction ingeniously combines cutting-edge science and unforgettable characters. It has won multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards and choruses of critical acclaim. Now, with Darwin's Radio, Bear creates a nonstop thriller swirling with provocative ideas about the next step of human evolution.

In a cave high in the Alps, a renegade anthropologist discovers a frozen Neanderthal couple with a Homo sapiens baby. Meanwhile, in southern Russia, the U.N. investigation of a mysterious mass grave is cut short. One of the investigators, molecular biologist Kaye Lang, returns home to the U.S. to learn that her theory on human retroviruses has been verified with the discovery of SHEVA, a virus that has slept in our DNA for millions of years and is now waking up. How are these seemingly disparate events connected? Kaye Lang and her colleagues must race against a genetic time bomb to find out.

Darwin's Radio pulses with intelligent speculation, international adventure, and political intrigue as it explores timeless human themes. George Guidall's masterful performance heightens the excitement and keeps you enthralled until the final fascinating word.

©2000 Greg Bear (P)2000 Recorded Books

Critic reviews

• Winner, 2000 Nebula Award - Best Novel

"Centered on well-developed, highly believable figures who are working scientists and full-fledged human beings, this fine novel is sure to please anyone who appreciates literate, state-of-the-art SF." (Publishers Weekly)

Wonderful book and performance!

Greg Bear and George Guidall. How can this story be better? Captivating. Loved it again.

Good narration & story, bad editing

The narrator was great, however, the editing was extremely poor. When the book transitions to the next chapter, there is no pause at all, and it sounds like the narrator is continuing the previous sentence. If you can overlook this frequent confusion, it is a good story.

excellent read

I ask 3 things of every novel I read: that it capture and excite me, that it entertain me and that it educate me. "Darwin's Radio" gets 4 stars in every catagory. Should you ask yourself during the course of your read, "is this feasible?" Think of this - if in 1980 you asked could there be a world wide network that connected every computer, or a cellphone with a 100 gig hard drive that was part of that network, or that the Soviet Union would collapse within a decade....none of these things would have seemed feasible either

Pretty good!

This is a great story but a bit slow. I plan on reading the sequel.

Well deserved of all the awards

One of Bear's best, this book challenges the very foundations of incrementalist neo-Darwinism with well researched science and a small amount of speculation. The rich characters and intricate plot-lines form a deeply believable and frightening story.

Interesting story

Any additional comments?

After listening to this book, I thought I'd like the sequel "Darwin's Children" but the latter just didn't do anything for me....very draggy, and I couldn't be bothered to finish it. So I returned the latter (Thanks for that Audible).

Bait and switch

Darwin's Radio is an excellent stand alone book. The science is very detailed, and the overall concept requires only a little suspension of disbelief. If the next book in the series had dragged the science back to the realistic, it could have been a wonderful trilogy. Instead, book 2 goes further afield from plausible evolutionary mechanisms, and book 3 goes full bore mystical. If you like sneaky new-age advocacy, this is the trilogy for you. If you like hard core sci fi, this ain't it.

Change is hard and frightening

If the next evolutionary step happened, would we recognize it? Or would we think it a disease to destroy? When a part of our genetic code suddenly activates, and women's pregnancies start go go wrong, it's a race to find the cause and cure it. Or is it something else entirely?

Exciting and thought provoking look at how we react to change and what we might do to keep the status quo rather than take a step into the unknown.

Good Story, Bad Audio

Some of the chapters seemed like they got cut off in mid sentence, but the story was so good I kept listening and will now be broke for the rest of the week because I had to buy the sequel.

Good story. But misses the word that became flesh.

Good story. Provides two views of the world. A third view presented misses the word that became flesh and dwelt among us. I hope Greg came to know this. RIP Greg Bear.