A new disease has popped up. Women are having miscarriages, losing extremely deformed fetuses. Further investigation leads researchers to conclude that some ancient component of human DNA has suddenly reactivated and is causing these miscarriages.
As scientists and the medical community try to figure out what is going wrong, a huge divide emerges, with one group claiming it is some kind of sudden evolution. And the other group claiming it is a disease that must be stopped.
A small group of the 'it's evolution' scientists go rogue, running from the US government that is tracking pregnant women and performing abortions because they claim the offspring are just disease carriers who pose a terrible risk to human survival. Naturally, since no one seems to know what is really happening, it causes massive social upheaval and riots.
Greg Bear loves to delve into the science. Unfortunately, a lot of it is hard to follow, especially for a person who does not have fairly high level science knowledge. I don't need the amount of detail he goes into to understand the story. He just goes on and on about DNA and genetics. It just adds a lot of pretty unreadable bulk to the story. My paperback copy was over 500 pages long. Naturally I did what I always do when authors are suffering from word diarrhea: I skip it. Minutia doesn't interest me.
Anyway, two of the 'it's evolution' scientists, a man and a woman, get together and have a baby. They want to prove their thesis is correct by giving birth to a new version of human. They spend the rest of the story hiding from the Feds.
The evolutionary changes that Bear images are odd. How they are suppose to improve the human race in its struggle to cope with overpopulation and environmental degradation are not explained. One of the changes he imagines is people have squid-like skin that changes colors as a form of communication. I expect all that is explained in the sequel, Darwin's Children. Which I will not be reading.
Here is a review by Publishers Weekly.
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