Book Review: Blood Music by Greg Bear (1983)

The second in my series of reading of sci-fi books in 2023, Blood Music is – how can I say this without spoiling much – well, it starts off as a by-the-numbers story of a scientist forced to experiment on himself. The story proceeds a bit predictably for a little while until things go completely off the rails and the plot becomes quite the opposite; completely unpredictable. Interestingly, the protagonist – and we have to use that term lightly here – turns out to not be our protagonist after all as we’re introduced to several new characters a third of the way through the book, one of whom the story rallies around though he had been a minor character up until that point. This makes the other characters somewhat superfluous, though they do serve as observers for a transformation of sorts. Unfortunately, none of the characters are much of anyone for the reader to bond with; our first protagonist gets the rug pulled out from under him then none of the new characters are really fleshed out enough to sympathize with. This is perhaps the book’s greatest flaw. 

The story is otherwise easy enough to read while keeping us guessing. In fact, it was the guessing that kept my attention. It’s no ordinary book that can make you say, “Can this story get any weirder?” several times over. That’s the book’s greatest strength and what makes it a page turner. But, in saying that the story is very strange, it may be too strange for the casual reader and a book only a hardened sci-fi lover is going to savor. Overall, I enjoyed this book as much as my previous read – Solaris – but for completely different reasons though both their plots are certainly mind-bending. Is Blood Music perfect? No. But it just might make you question the fabric of reality.