Darwin's Radio: In the next stage of evolution, humans are history... [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

In der ersten Haelfte entwickelt sich das Buch wie ein Krimi mit mehreren parallelen Handlungsstraengen. Allerdings recht konventionell im Muster aehnlicher Romane: sensationelle Funde werden gemacht und Wissenschaftler wittern Ruhm und Ehre. Selbst der 'boese Reiche' der den Ruhm an sich reissen will scheint nicht zu fehlen.
In der zweiten Haelfte tritt das Thriller-Element jedoch leicht in den Hintergrund. Der Roman beginnt ganz nebenbei die Auswirkungen der Entdeckung fuer die Menschheit zu diskutieren indem er die Gesellschaft in zwei Lager spaltet: konservative Ablehnung und nahezu blinde Begeisterung - ohne jedoch in Schwarzweiss-Malerei zu verfallen...

Der Leser kommt auf jeden Fall auf seine Kosten - ohne in den Zwang zu geraten persoenlich Stellung zu beziehen. Das Buch ist spannend bis zum Schluss - der Ausgang ist keineswegs vorherzusehen und die zugrundeliegende Idee faszinierend und gut ausgearbeitet. Fazit: empfehlenswerte kurzweilige Unterhaltung mit Tiefgang als Bonus.

Having said that, it is therefore almost mandatory that you have at least BSc level knowledge of molecular biology and/or genetics. It took me quite long to read the book, because I tried to follow the scientific arguments the way I would follow them in a real scientific paper. Of course this is not possible, since most of it is speculation, but the elegant part here is that the speculation is based on state of the art molecular biology (again in contrary to Blood Music, which is as much science as The Lord of the Rings...). In other words, the speculative part of the science is in an area, where nobody has real knowledge, hence the theory is not so easily contradicted. It helps the book, that it was read over and over again by real scientists. The list of PhDs in his acknowledgements outnumbers those of most PhD thesis.

If you do not know much of molecular biology, stay away from this book. As such, it is not a well written SF novel, since the author sacrifices storytelling for his greater theory of evolution. A scientific text book does not make a good read, even if blended in with some action. I do not think Greg Bear is a good story teller, but he is a very good pseudo scientific (not SF!) writer. He writes about things that may almost be true (not like „real" SF like Asimov, Gibson or even Star Wars, where you know exactly that things will never happen the way described in the book).

An important observation (put into the mouth of the heroine): In the past, science was advanced by a few outstanding scientists like Darwin, Einstein, Heisenberg or Watson/Crick. Those guys were amongst the few scientist who worked more or less together in their respective area, often sharing their ideas prior to publication. Today there are hundreds and thousands of those scientists around the world. Very often several dozens of them working on the small problem of a small problem in a highly specialised sub area of life sciences. All are competing for grant money and publication space in scientific journals, and all are very eager criticising each others work with egos rising high. To survive in science you have to be highly competitive and have little ideas which are not too exotic and fit in the bigger picture. Should you step out of line by threatening a dogma, you commit scientific suicide. Unless you convince the scientific high priest of your respective field all over the world that you are right and they are wrong. (Happens maybe once every 10 years, last with the Prion theory). In which case you are up for a Nobel Prize.

I think this is one (if not the only) main message of Darwin's Radio.