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)

Fascinating biological SF, with some flaws

Having started my SF reading at about age 11 with The Andromeda Strain, and having enjoyed some of Bear's earlier works, I decided to give this one a try. It was fascinating, though a bit uneven.

Many have criticized the narrator's reading, but I mostly thought that was fine. He does mispronounce or give some words incorrect emphasis, but overall I thought he did ok with the heavy science and the voices. His distinctions among characters are perhaps not as strong as she narrators, but not as one-dimensional as some reviewers have portrayed. I liked his reading of the "Five Tribes" elder male, and thoughts he captured the rhythms and inflections there without being over-done. (I am not of significant native ancestry myself, however, so my own ear may not be sufficiently sensitive to catch errors there.)

Bear's science was interesting, and reasonably believable. I myself do have a Genetics degree (from way back in 1984), so I have some background in the terminology, but I think it should be understandable to those without that training as well. My own education is far enough out of date that I wouldn't catch anything that might be implausible based on more recent research, however.

What did clunk on my ear were the references to computer technologies that date the book pretty clearly. It's difficult to write decent near-future fiction, and the speed of change in computer technology is a big part of why. In this case, the references to things like pagers and "closing" cell phones recall technologies that were cutting edge 15-20 years ago, but already read as quaintly outdated. The joke about the "next generation morning after pill" being called the "pentium" pill is understandable to my late-Boomer ears, but might well be lost on Millenials, for instance. But if you can suspend your disbelief enough to work around the clunky technology references, the story itself is fairly compelling.

Similarly the references to researchers famous in AIDS research in he late 80's were recognizable to me, but felt dated or sometimes nostalgic. And then there was the tragic referencing of Bill Cosby as someone whose reputation would lead people to trust him. :( Of course Bear can't be faulted for not knowing what nobody knew at the time, it does point up the risk of being too specific in certain kinds of references, when writing near-future SF.

On the whole, I'd recommend this one to someone like myself, with some biosciences background and/or an appreciation of books and movies like Outbreak, Andromedra Strain, and The Uplift Wars, but who don't demand absolute cutting edge science or 100% accuracy.

Slight formatting issues with the audio

Would you consider the audio edition of Darwin's Radio to be better than the print version?

Yes and no. The audio was great, don't get me wrong. I just still like to read the book too.

Did the narration match the pace of the story?

Yes

Any additional comments?

The audio is a bit glitchy. It cuts over too quickly at the end of some chapters. I think it misses the last sentence or two of the chapter. Not a huge deal breaker but slightly annoying.

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.

No. Just no.

I finally finished this audiobook, forcing my way to the end after numerous attempts. I am a Huge SF fan. Starting with Asimov in my teens. This one fell so short of expectations, mired in minutiae and disjointed in the telling. Pass on by.

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.