My first review for sciencefiction.com has now been posted there.
Greg Bear, if he reads it, will not be happy but the quality of his novels has been in sad decline over the last few years.
Bear’s writing career has been defined by the taxonomy of hard sciences: Nanotech in “Blood Music”; General Relativity and Cosmology in “Eon” and “Eternity”; Quantum Mechanics and the Fermi Paradox in “Moving Mars” and “The Forge of God”; Jungian Psychology and AI in “Queen of Angels”; Evolution and Genetics in “Darwin’s Radio” ... and then, suddenly, all the boxes were checked.
Ever since, Bear has been going through the motions: his technique is still there, he can turn a good sentence but the writing has turned clichéd and lazy. I fear this latest book is too tired, unoriginal and frankly boring to be a success.
