This allows Vergil to remove the tailored microbes once he gets home, so he can carry on working on them at his leisure at least, that’s his idea. Instead, he decides to incubate them in the only safe container he can get his hands on at short notice: himself. Hauled over the coals when the company bigwigs learn of his unauthorised experiments, he’s ordered to destroy all the cultures he’s been working on. Vergil Ulam is a headstrong, maverick researcher for a biotech R&D lab. This combination makes it uniquely vulnerable to what might be termed ‘creeping anachronism’, and some references within the book – VDTs, the Soviet Union, the WTC’s Twin Towers – do indeed date it, to the extent that it now must be read as some kind of alternate history.Īs it happens, Blood Music is also the only book in the ‘Future Classics’ series which I’d read prior to this year’s re-release, and I’ve found it an interesting and illuminating experience to re-read it on the other side of a 20-year gulf. The branding as ‘future classics’, whether justified or not, is at the least an attractive play on words, and invites comparison with acknowledged science-fiction masterworks such as Foundation, Ringworld, and Dune.Īmongst the eight novels of the series, Blood Music is an outlier for several reasons: it’s by Greg Bear, an American (most of the ‘Future Classics’ authors are British), it’s the only book in the series more than 20 years old (originally published in 1985, whereas only one other book in the series was published prior to 1995), and it’s most directly concerned with near-future extrapolation. Gollancz’s ‘Future Classics’ series, of which Blood Music is one volume, is (for now) a set of eight books presented as modern seminal works in speculative fiction. (Review first published on the ASIM website, November 2007)

Blood music bear