As a huge fan of Greg Bear's various wonders of the universe, but I found this to be very dull and disappointing. I love science fiction that is grounded in biology, and Greg Bear has some fantastic biology-driven novels: Blood Music is my favorite, but see also Darwin's Radio, Legacy, and Hull Zero Three. Even in books that aren't primarily premised in biology, Greg Bear's biological references are usually well crafted and imaginative, and confer richness to the world of the book as well as depth to the plot. The galactic ecology described in The Forge of God, the living cities in Strength of Stones, and the transformed humans in Queen of Angels or Eon, may not be fully developed or very unique ideas, but at least they are fun to imagine and think about.Vitals is not fun to think about. Unfortunately its central science fictional concepts, concerning microbial information transmission and immortality, seemed uninteresting and perhaps better explored by Greg Bear himself in some of his other books. In Blood Music, a plague of engineered microbes unfolds into the coldly beautiful destruction/transcendence of humanity, and in Slant, bacteria are the computational processors in a powerful organic artificial intelligence. Where does Vitals take you, with its mind-control bacteria and immortality intrigue? To a cruise-ship full of weirdos. Blah. Like the similarly uninspiring Dead Lines,Vitals just seems small in comparison to many of Greg Bear's other works, so I didn't care for it.
I haven't given too many books three stars, but here on Goodreads 3 stars equates to "I liked it" or something like that. And I did. (Like it, that is.) It was different from what I expected after reading the first several pages and the inside cover blurb, but it wasn't bad. So what separated it from the 4 and 5 star books I've read recently? Well, it was convoluted and confusing. I thought what I was reading was a rather straightforward speculative fiction novel about immortality, getting into the philosophical implications while battling those who already have immortality and want to keep it for themselves. But it was something different than that - delving into history, getting into bacterial group intelligence, leading to mind control...far from the story I thought it might be. In some ways perhaps this angle would have been better, but I just got confused and bored at times. But not always, and I did enjoy the history lessons, and the philosophical discussions that did occur, and I thought the action sequences were pretty tense and pretty well done. I finished it, and got something out of it, and at no point did I tell myself that I didn't want to keep going. As I said...I liked it. But I can't give it a higher recommendation, unfortunately. It could have been even better, I think.
What do You think about Vitals (2003)?
It's hard to stomach all the poor reviews of Greg Bear, especially for this book which is really great. I've found his angle on science fiction to be acutely amazing and convincing; probably closer to reality than most readers will admit. I guess he is just way over the heads of readers of typical sci-fi scenarios. With Bear, the science is not just a dumb prop or setting to write more crap, it's actually where the crux of the whole plot is centered. The fantasy is in thinking that the science just might be true - or pretty close to being true - might as well be true, since we live in a world of unknowns just as great. I pity the reader who finds these scenarios unbelievable or too fantastic.
—Mark Schomburg
Picked the book because I had heard the author was good. While the style was decent, and the readability good, the story itself was poor. It had a decent core premise, the engineering of bacterial strains released through the population which could later be triggered. Unfortunately, it failed to stop or at least reign itself in somewhere within the realm of possibility, and instead went completely off the deep end.If the writer had managed to at least try to tie together the loose ends at the en
—Spencer
Bear has some very interesting ideas but he chooses a very poor framework of an international conspiracy thriller to support them. Clearly, Bear is out of his depth here and is unable to write a convincing thriller, although he excels at explaining cutting-edge scientific ideas in an entertaining way; but there is too little science in this novel. Bear's novel starts off promisingly with a scientist descending into the depths of the Atlantic Ocean looking for the fountain of youth among primordial bacterial colonies, but the story soon devolves into a muddled mystery and Bear seems unable to decide the direction he wants to take with his plot. He explores mind-control along with anti-ageing research and ends up with giving neither of them proper attention. A very lackluster effort by a good science fiction author.
—Farhan
