<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

Blood Music Greg Bear’s 1985 novel was not his first book, but rather his seventh. Yet it was not till the appearance of this cyberpunk masterpiece (specifically in its earlier novella form) that he was acknowledged as one of the leading lights of his generation of writers.

Spoiler Warning: Plot details and/or information about the ending follow. If you wish to enjoy the work first, stop reading here and return at another time.

Biologist Vergil Ulam works for the California firm Genetron on their biochip project, attempting to fuse wet and silicon tech. But in his spare time, he's been using the company's facilities for a secret project all his own. Starting with a culture of his own lymphocytes, Vergil has genetically engineered something brand new: sentient cells, colonies of which approach or exceed human intelligence. When his transgressions are discovered, Vergil is ordered to destroy all his precious work or be fired. He commits most of his cultures to acid and fire, but saves a small colony of super-cells. When, later, he is fired anyhow, he discovers that the only way to remove his brainchildren from the secure facility is to inject them into his own body.

Thus begins the catastrophic chain of events that will eventually transform the surface of the entire planet.

Unemployed and adrift, Vergil becomes lovers with a woman named Candice. Unable to reveal his secrets to her, he visits his mother, but has no greater luck confiding to her. Returning home, Vergil finds his hand forced by eerie changes occurring in his body. Alternately bemused, frightened and thrilled, he contacts an old friend, Dr. Edward Milligan. Milligan discovers that the dwellers inside his pal have reconstructed Ulam's organs and skeleton, and are about to start work on their inventor's brain. Unable to cope with the knowledge alone, Milligan reaches out to Michael Bernard, a rich and famous scientist-entrepreneur who shares information about Ulam's condition and wishes to exploit the discovery. But before either man can do anything, they realize that they too are now infected with Ulam's all-conquering super-cells, or "noocytes." After reluctantly killing Ulam in a vain attempt to thwart the plague, Milligan returns home to undergo whatever transformations await him in the company of his equally infected wife. Meanwhile, Bernard journeys to Europe where he manages to place himself in isolation at a lab without contaminating anyone else.

Now the thinking plague is loose across all of North America, flowering exponentially and unstoppably, and our attention shifts to new sets of characters. Suzy McKenzie is a young woman in New York who awakes one morning to find the whole city turned alien. She is apparently the only human untouched by the Ulam contagion, and she begins a weird hegira to the World Trade Towers seeking help. Back in California, two uncontaminated brothers, John and Jerry, encounter Ulam's mother and begin their own search for answers. In Europe, Bernard serves as test subject in a vain attempt to stifle the plague, all the while learning from the tiny colonists within him. By the time all of North America is covered in a carpet of protoplasm, the human race seems doomed. And then the noocytes reveal their ultimate scheme.

Much imitated since its debut, this novel was truly the first to address nanotechnology in all its scary potential.

ISBNs

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• ISBN 978-0743444965