Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Blood Music
    Blood Music
    Blood Music
    Audiobook10 hours

    Blood Music

    Written by Greg Bear

    Narrated by George Guidall

    4/5

    ()

    Switch to ebook

    About this audiobook

    Vergil's innovative experiment restructuring the cells of a common virus becomes a nightmare when, in order to save his research, Vergil injects the entire culture into his bloodstream.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateNov 28, 2008
    ISBN9781436123853
    Author

    Greg Bear

    Greg Bear has won two Hugo Awards and three Nebula Awards and is a past president to the Science Fiction Writers of America. He lives in Seattle, Washington.

    More audiobooks from Greg Bear

    Related to Blood Music

    Related audiobooks

    Science Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Altered Carbon Gets Stuck In An Old Future

      Feb 12, 2018

      AS A GENRE, SCIENCE FICTION HAS never been smarter—especially as a more diverse array of characters have come to populate some of the most successful stories told onscreen. Last year’s Star Trek prequel cast a black woman as its lead, while the box o

      2 min read

    • Article

      Smrtss

      Apr 10, 2024

      In the dim, wet oven of the Huey’s troop compartment, the corporal sat on a flak jacket behind the sweat-stained backs of First Squad. Simms, the big machine gunner for Fire Team 2, leaned back against him, jamming the corporal’s knees right up to hi

      13 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems

      Sep 1, 2022

      1. Here there’s no rainy season.Sun scalds my forehead,yet the pool is empty. Beside it,a toppled table, its glass surface shattered.The asphalt is too hot for bare feet. 2. Far away: white hillocksand white dunes under a deepblue sky. Swirling winds

      5 min read

    • Article

      Quotients

      May 7, 2020

      Quotients
      8 min read

    • Article

      Roger’s PROFANISAURUS

      Feb 2, 2023

      Roger’s PROFANISAURUS
      8 min read

    • Article

      Roger’s PROFANISAURUS

      Feb 2, 2023

      Roger’s PROFANISAURUS
      8 min read

    • Article

      79 The Terrible Grinning Men

      Sep 10, 2020

      79 The Terrible Grinning Men
      8 min read

    • Article

      Lungs Of The Earth

      May 7, 2020

      Lungs Of The Earth
      10 min read

    • Article

      Roger's PROFANISAURUS

      Nov 19, 2020

      Roger's PROFANISAURUS
      8 min read

    • Article

      Lucky Accidents

      Jun 5, 2019

      Lucky Accidents
      3 min read

    • Article

      The Philosopher King of the Hoverflies: A roving meditation on nature, literature, and the joy of collecting flies.

      Mar 12, 2015

      As I now live on an island in the sea and am not an expert on anything but hoverflies, we will simply have to start there. In short, my artistic sense remained relatively undeveloped, and my past, as always, caught up with me. When anyone asked, ther

      26 min read

    • Article

      Book Club

      Nov 9, 2023

      Book Club
      5 min read

    • Article

      Letters

      Jun 15, 2023

      Fortean Times never fails to provide me with something to think about, but rarely as much as the assertion that mass panics like Havana syndrome and transdermal fentanyl overdoses have become “endemic and long term” [FT430:7]. I’d previously assumed

      12 min read

    • Article

      Breaking Good

      Aug 19, 2020

      Breaking Good
      12 min read

    • Article

      Breaking Good

      Aug 19, 2020

      Breaking Good
      12 min read

    • Article

      Roger’s PROFANISAURUS

      Oct 12, 2023

      Roger’s PROFANISAURUS
      7 min read

    • Article

      Town & Country Notebook

      Apr 3, 2024

      1) The Chester White is a breed of what animal? 2) Which brass instrument is commonly used for military signals? 3) What is the proper name for the human thigh bone? 4) Which constellation is named after the mother of Andromeda in Greek mythology? 5)

      4 min read

    • Article

      Good Vibrations

      Mar 4, 2024

      Good Vibrations
      6 min read

    • Article

      The Cave Of Adventure

      Jun 10, 2021

      You walk home from work through Citadel Park. This fine October afternoon is just warm enough that you are comfortable in the light cashmere cardigan and skirt you bought for exactly this kind of weather, an elegant dark green outfit that goes well w

      11 min read

    • Article

      NANDOR FODOR & THE TALKING MONGOOSE

      Sep 7, 2023

      Throughout the 1930s, the world’s newspapers were full of incredible stories about Gef, a ‘talking mongoose’ or ‘man-weasel’ who had allegedly appeared in the home of a peculiar family living in a somewhat dilapidated Isle of Man farmhouse. Gef was s

      11 min read

    • Article

      Roger’s PROFANISAURUS

      Jan 5, 2022

      Roger’s PROFANISAURUS
      5 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Blood Music

    4/5

    727 ratings29 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      This book makes me sad that it took me so long to discover it and the other works by Greg Bear. I know I must have read some of his work before, but I can't place my finger on what it was. I am so happy that I have discovered, or rediscovered, his work.
    • 4/5
      Great classic written in the best traditions of hard sci-fi.
    • 5/5
      Great story, interesting ideas, well narrated. Could not ask for more.
    • 3/5
      Somewhat strained story lines that demands the listener accept a lot of unrealistic premises.
    • 3/5
      The story: 5/5. I love Greg Bear. The narrator: 2/5, horribly slow with overly long pauses between phrases. I had to listen to it in 1.2x speed for it to be bearable.
    • 4/5
      What an interesting story. It started a bit rough for me with a bit of the science feeling out of date. But by page 100 the story hit its stride and then it became a delightful read. Very imaginative and well worth reading. Greg Bear was certainly deserving for the accolades he received for this novel. It did have some of the feel of Stephen King’s The Stand but was much more optimistic in outlook.
    • 2/5
      I am having a hard time describing this book, so bear with me. You know that place where an author takes a left turn into crazy-town? It's an easy place to get to and a difficult place to do well. I, personally, prefer when an author takes us to The Land Beyond Reason, also known as Pure Imagination and a suburb of Science Fiction, slowly, so slowly that it feels like a logical progression. This book is not like that. It takes a hard left to crazy-town about a third of the way through when our unlikeable Protagonist 1 (Virgil) is murdered by his dull friend who is just trying to save the world (sortof).

      Protagonist 1 was playing around in the lab and made intelligent cells. He injected himself with them. They proceeded to transform him and, being trillions of intelligent beings with little concept of the scale on which we live, explore the world by getting in the water and being generally unavoidably contagious. Fairly quickly all of North America has succumbed to noocytes and is a wasteland except for 20 or so people who for some reason (even though they had surely destroyed millions of similar people without such reservations) had kept alive until they had learned to work with these people's unusual biochemistry. We follow four of these people. We also follow Bernard, Protagonist 2, who flew off to Europe to have himself quarantined and who is transitioning very slowly. It turns out that the noocytes don't kill everyone. Once they had learned how, they actually assimilate those people who become noocytes.

      There is also another hard left when the noocytes turn North America into some sort of huge biomass and another when they stop nuclear bombs from going off by distorting the rules of the universe temporarily (did I mention that so many information processing beings so densely located are able to affect the very fabric of the universe?) and _another_ when the noocytes transition to existing on a quantum level and _*another*_ when having the noocytes on a quantum level is threatening to rip the earth apart and BAM! the book ends.

      Speaking of the book ending, when you exist on a purely informational level one of the millions of copies of you will spend time a sort of thought holodeck where you will redo your regrets in macro-life.

      After reading this book I was mostly left saying, "huh? Why did I just read this?" It gets two stars instead of one because had I known the nature of the book I would have not read it at all, but knowing the nature of the book I can understand why other people would want to read it.
    • 5/5
      How does Greg come up with this ingenious material? Creative genius.
    • 4/5
      Had read some of his work that he had written in Asimov's Foundation series, enjoyed that so picked this up and really enjoyed this too. Good plot
    • 5/5
      "Blood Music" was a great sci-fi novel. I'd seen it around for years, but never gotten to picking it up and reading it.It begins with a genetic research scientist, Vergil Ulam, and his personal research done at the lab where he works. He's brilliant, but not entirely ethical, although he doesn't see it that way, he feels he's entitled to what he does, for instance, he sees no problem hacking into a university's computer to fake his academic record, because he knows he's capable of the job he's doing, the managers just need a "sound and light show" to go with it.Any coincidence that Vergil's last name is Ulam, the same as the "father" of the hydrogen bomb?Ulam's personal research is into converting individual cells into computers, with memory and processing power. His earlier work, E. Coli cells is successful, but each individual cell has only the brain power of a mouse. Later he uses some of his own white blood cells, and they each end up with the brain power of a monkey.But when his boss finds out about it, and doesn't want anything to become public for fear of hurting the company's IPO, he orders Vergil to destroy his work. Vergil starts to, but then feels like they're his children and instead of destroying all, injects some (a few million cells) back into his body, intending to extract them again once he finds a job in another lab.And that's how his intelligent research gets out of the lab and changes the world...Overall I enjoyed it till the changes towards the end that left me sort of confused.
    • 4/5
      Now a classic, I think this is a well-written, very suspenseful novel.
    • 3/5
      “I'm not as nonchalant as I seem. I'm worried, Edward. I'd like to find a better way to control them before they find out about my brain. I mean, think of it. They're in the billions by now, more if they're converting other kinds of cells. Maybe trillions. Each cluster smart. I'm probably the smartest thing on the planet, and they haven't begun to get their act together. I don't want them to take over.” He laughed unpleasantly. “Steal my soul, you know? So think of some treatment to block them. Maybe we can starve the little buggers. Just think on it." He buttoned his shirt. "Give me a call."A selfish and slapdash scientist brings about the end of the world through sheer carelessness . I'm not sure how I feel about this book, but the more far-fetched it got the less I cared about what was happening.
    • 4/5
      Another Hugo book read - this time "Blood Music" by Greg Bear. Its one that has been sitting in my shelves for awhile - and I needed a short afternoon read. It was a good choice - not to heady, perfect length, good story.First - I found the first half to be a bit stereotypical - nerdy anti-social scientist running un-ethical experiments at a biotech firm releases a world ending plague of microbes that convert everything to more microbes. Its been done over and over - however, this might be the first story that everybody copied from. The second half of the book is where it shines. It goes from an end of the world scenario to something completely different. Just what are the intelligent microbes doing, and why are they doing it - is the question. The main character (now the handsome scientist/businessman) is still stereotypical. Not a lot of character development. Other characters such as, developmentally challenged Suzy, who was not changed, must survive in a changed world. There are other characters, but they mostly fade out of the story.This book suffers from a lack of depth from the characters, but it shines when it comes to how the intelligent bacteria was handled. Even though this book was written in 1985, it didn't feel dated. Recommended.
    • 2/5
      Interesting concept with some interesting twists, but just did not keep my attention and some parts just did not make sense.
    • 3/5
      in Natalie Angier's chapter on evolutionary biology in The Canon, she notes that among the attributes of living organisms, cell structure has undergone the least amount of change across millions of years of evolution. So what if some mad scientist tampers with that structure to make "smart" cells? Association item: the Treehouse of Horror episode where Lisa creates an entire civilization from a culture of Bart's snot. Bear writes better SF than Michael Crichton, fwiw.
    • 4/5
      An award winning and original book that is not your typical protagonist-slays-enemy story. The book changes direction dramatically mid way through and we are left with an interesting and mostly convincing discussion of biological computing, alternative theories of physics and the reaction of the world to global catastrophe.Good but not stunning, and certainly not for everybody.
    • 2/5
      I am having a hard time describing this book, so bear with me. You know that place where an author takes a left turn into crazy-town? It's an easy place to get to and a difficult place to do well. I, personally, prefer when an author takes us to The Land Beyond Reason, also known as Pure Imagination and a suburb of Science Fiction, slowly, so slowly that it feels like a logical progression. This book is not like that. It takes a hard left to crazy-town about a third of the way through when our unlikeable Protagonist 1 (Virgil) is murdered by his dull friend who is just trying to save the world (sortof).

      Protagonist 1 was playing around in the lab and made intelligent cells. He injected himself with them. They proceeded to transform him and, being trillions of intelligent beings with little concept of the scale on which we live, explore the world by getting in the water and being generally unavoidably contagious. Fairly quickly all of North America has succumbed to noocytes and is a wasteland except for 20 or so people who for some reason (even though they had surely destroyed millions of similar people without such reservations) had kept alive until they had learned to work with these people's unusual biochemistry. We follow four of these people. We also follow Bernard, Protagonist 2, who flew off to Europe to have himself quarantined and who is transitioning very slowly. It turns out that the noocytes don't kill everyone. Once they had learned how, they actually assimilate those people who become noocytes.

      There is also another hard left when the noocytes turn North America into some sort of huge biomass and another when they stop nuclear bombs from going off by distorting the rules of the universe temporarily (did I mention that so many information processing beings so densely located are able to affect the very fabric of the universe?) and _another_ when the noocytes transition to existing on a quantum level and _*another*_ when having the noocytes on a quantum level is threatening to rip the earth apart and BAM! the book ends.

      Speaking of the book ending, when you exist on a purely informational level one of the millions of copies of you will spend time a sort of thought holodeck where you will redo your regrets in macro-life.

      After reading this book I was mostly left saying, "huh? Why did I just read this?" It gets two stars instead of one because had I known the nature of the book I would have not read it at all, but knowing the nature of the book I can understand why other people would want to read it.
    • 2/5
      Highly overrated. I enjoyed this book until Vergil Ulam injects himself with the cells he is working on. What the hell? I lost interest after that and then just sleep walked through the whole book thinking all the while that this could have been so much better.
    • 5/5
      The original gray goo apocalypse. These days we're afraid of nanotechnology and cyber-singularities, but apart from a couple is quaint leftovers from the eighties (disk drives, what no Internet?) it's still a fresh as when I first read it.
    • 3/5
      Nanotechnology--molecular-level machines that are capable of self-replication, become self aware and start redefining
    • 4/5
      This is definitely a "whoa" book. Hard sf ages quickly and there are a few visable cracks in this 1985 novel ( video screens and floppy disks to mention a couple), but the ideas behind the story-science gone awry, observation as a force of evolution, etc. etc...do what all good science fiction books should do-THEY MAKE YOU THINK! I really enjoyed it. Granted, the characters get a bit of a bum rush, some storylines just deadend, but the concepts keep the story afloat. I can definitely see the beginnings of Darwin's Radio in this book.
    • 3/5
      Dorris Lessing recommended this in an interview as one of her favorite sci fi reads so I thought I'd give it a whirl. I was groaning through the initial pages of typical adolescent fantasy crap: Allergy prone, four-eyed, socially inept (yet brilliant!) nerd transforms into super-being via laboratory shenanigans and gets laid, but then the story turned into something much more interesting. If you are like me, bored to death by most sci fi, this one might be worth trying out.
    • 4/5
      Unusual. All the way through this I had the odd sensation that I'd read it or something very similar before. It never came to me what it was.The basic premise is something that has definetly been the subject of many novels, but Bear writing in the 80s will have been at the forefront. It has taken a couple of decades for the biotech industry to reach the prevalence in understanding it now holds. This unfortunately means we understand a lot more than we did then, and many of concepts are now out-of-date or just downright impossible. Also seriously dating the novel is the computer technology. Considering it was published '85, Bear did quite well at predicting it's widespread uptake in laboratories et al, but the continued references to VDTs (presumably Visual Display Terminals) grates every single time.Virgil Ulam is your almost stereotypical mad scientist, poor social skills, but technically brilliant. As a sideline to the work he's supposed to be doing for a new BioTech start-up (also a very good prescience from the 80s), he starts looking at introns (non replicating parts of DNA) within simple cells. He manages to get them to replicate, massively increasing the information storage and hence processing capabilities of the cells (this is the bit that's completely impossible) He know's he has suceeded in doing this because they can run mazes just like lab rats. Being a mad scientist however means that he isn't that hot on security, and so he gets found out. Just before he gets canned, he takes the desperate step of injecting hmself with his 'clever' cell lines. Secure in the knoweldge that only he understands, he knows he has a couple of weeks to find an new job in another lab where he can continue to work on the cells. After all they're only cells like any other in his body, and what harm could it do?The rest of the book covers the details of precisely what the consequences can be of not knowing what you are doing. As seen by the very few survivors who happen to be genetically compatible. Annoyingly the tale form his mother's POV is left incomplete. I don't think this is an anti-GM creed in the way that Jurrasic Park might be, but the basic message - Be extremely careful if you don't fully understand what it is you are experimenting with - remains the same. The actual technological suggestions aren't to be taken seriously, the consequences are. Bear doesn't write the most empathic characters going, he is much more ideas orientated, and as such this isn't a particularly gripping novel. But it's readable enough and even though badly dated at times the background principles remain awe inspiring.
    • 4/5
      It is difficult to put into words why I like this book so much. I’ve read it probably 6 or 7 times and I’m still fascinated with the concept of high intelligence at the micro-scale. Yes, it is perhaps too long and quite choppy, but I can forgive that because the ideas in this book are so intriguing. Plus George Guidall’s voice in narration is gentle and dreamlike; adding to the nirvana-like concept of the Noo-Sphere and the Thought Universe. Tantalizing.Like other good science thriller writers, Bear gives us an explanation of the mechanics underlying his story. I both understood it and took it as read; not being a scientist myself I can’t easily verify whether what he says is true. Basically it sounded plausible and so I could go with it as the basis of the novel; that is that the scientist Ulam in working with the natural mechanics of information exchange among cells, accidentally engineered learning cells, which evolved into sentient, intelligent cells. Not so scary until it is explained that they still work like cells; that is in groups. Now we have groups of intelligent cells running amok in the human body.Eventually they figure out how to overcome the rejection syndrome when moving to another human and they spread. They are explorers and consider Ulum and other early hosts as godlike beings. They have no concept of the macro scale, but when they do get it, they bide their time and continue to learn. It seems to me that because of their co-dependent nature they aren’t subject to the same selfish aggression that humans are. Their very natures are rooted in cooperation and co-existence; like the Borg the concept of the individual is difficult for them to understand. Through interaction as peers with their hosts Ulam and Bernard, they realize more and more about what it is to be human and Bernard experiences not only his own memories, but those of others. This is accomplished through something like mitochondrial DNA; a structure within cells that encodes for memory and serves as a long-term storage vault through generations of people. Racial memory for lack of a better term, only it is stored at a cellular level and can be reproduced and replayed; experienced by others. The original story (which I’ve only read once) is more of a cautionary tale a la Frankenstein; casting the scientist as arrogant, irresponsible and destructive. The novel only starts out that way when the changes to humans in the story are thought to be a disease. The “plague” quickly turns to something else in my mind; a salvation. Humanity will surely destroy itself one day, but preserving ourselves (encoding ourselves) as noocytes gives us immortality of a sense. Basically the story changes to one of the next stage in human evolution. A topic Bear seems to like. Eventually every human loses its macro scale and becomes literally dissolved into a mass of living “tissue”. Certain portions of a person’s brain are encoded to retain the whole of the personality, memories, knowledge and experiences. The rest of the body is taken as general building material for this new micro-scale world. The parts that are fully developed noocytes continue to think, feel and become part of the whole; working with peer cell groups from other people. It’s as if all of humanity has become one gigantic organism. Of course the cells encoded with individual personalities continue to change and one can meet up with a version of oneself; one changed and evolved, but yet still containing the essential personality of the original person. It’s all very idealistic and dreamlike.Many hard core science fiction fans hate this idea and would have liked Bear to keep to known territory; the sacred state of humanity and the preservation there of. Some even liken this to a fascist attempt at racial cleansing; to get rid of the old, the ugly, the mentally challenged etc. Bear never goes there though. He wonders at it through a character; are the bad and defective people integrated as well as the geniuses, or are they deleted or altered to shed their negative characteristics? Another character’s relatives explain it to one not immediately assimilated by saying that they ‘fix’ people. And they do, but do they delete people who don’t meet some kind of standard? We readers never know, but we can speculate.The upshot of so many billions of trillions of intelligent beings concentrated in such a small space is the observer effect. That is the premise that mere observation and/or measurement of a phenomenon will affect it in some way. Any set of closely observed phenomena will change and too much change upsets the balance of the physics of the universe. Then the question; does the universe set the mind’s direction or does the mind set the universe’s direction? Bear doesn’t answer because he can’t. We’re left to wonder about it.And a good deal more. One problem of this novel is that of characters created, fussed over and then dropped completely without resolution. He does the same with some ideas and concepts. I would have liked more resolution if only to bring the story to a close, if not to answer scientific queries. Once the noocytes return, what happens? We’re left with a dream-like vignette of Bernard and his first girlfriend and their first date. In actuality, they never had a second and he’s regretted it all his life. Now encoded into the Thought Universe, he has reconnected with the encoded version of this woman and some of each part of them can relive and redirect the past in a new future. All very idealistic and sort of clangs against the hard science of what came before it. I love the idea of it and I think Bear did, too, but it seems he came to it late in the writing of the novel and I think he should have gone back and modified the spirit and execution of the first parts of the story to check up with his change of plans. He also could have killed some story lines that went nowhere, too. It makes for a messy, but strangely satisfying package.
    • 4/5
      For some time I've been looking for a copy of Blood Music because I remembered reading a good review of it years ago, and I've come to like Greg Bear. Recently I got hold of a used copy, and I wasn't disappointed. I might have been if I'd special ordered it full price.It actually reads like two, possibly three different novellas strung together. The first is the cautionary Frankensteinesque horror story. The arrogant creator of new life is destroyed by his own creation. Which escapes.The second is the story of the person who figures out what has happened and the risk this new life form poses to the rest of the world, and who sacrifices himself to to prevent complete disaster.The second story is intermixed with the story of the new life itself. What might its goals and desires be? How would it effect the world around it? How would it even perceive that world and the life we know?If anything the last, most speculative part is also the weakest part. Bear does a decent job trying to think and present the completely alien, but I kept being sidetracked by my own inability to accept the basic premise of how his micro-community gestalt mind actually functioned. Knowing *less* biology might have actually made that part easier for me.Still an enjoyable and well written book.
    • 4/5
      Thought it was about nanotechnology, which was why I decided to read it. Some of the cover blurbs are also, I don't know, perhaps inaccurate is the right word. I shouldn't expect much veracity from blurbs, but to trumpet this book because it is by someone who really knows the underlying science seems beside the point. Maybe he does. The whole idea of biologic was so speculative in 1984, not to mention other stuff. It's like saying that the reason you read Chrichton's books is because he really knows his science. In the book Prey, for example, he could, but it doesn't really matter, because nanomachines taking over your wife's body is still mostly speculative. Does any of that make sense? I guess what I mean is that the science knowledge didn't seem to have anything to do with the book's verisimilitude.The book's ending is a little deceptive, which may account for the nano-designation it gets in some articles. The cells that take over North America recede into a smaller space, exiting the continent entirely. But this has nothing to do with Van Der Waal forces or nano-dimensional stuff. It all takes place (in the novel) through an information-based warping of the space-time continuum, if I understood correctly.
    • 4/5
      Very technical,good ending, didn't wimp out. Very cool idea. Just read the short story a couple years later and that rocked too.
    • 3/5
      Although the premise is great, the book falls flat about 2/3 of the way through. I am somewhat biased about the book because I read the short story first and that, in my opinion, was much stronger and the short story should have been left alone. The book is a good read but was disappointing. Worth reading one time I suppose.
    • 4/5
      I mentally inhaled this in one night without even realising it