Darwin's Children is Greg Bear's masterful sequel to his Nebula Award-winning science fiction novel, Darwin's Radio. If anything, it outdoes it's esteemed predecessor through it's perfect blend of intriguing speculation, character development, and social commentary.
The novel begins 11 years after the events of the Darwin's Radio. Thousands of the "virus children," the new kind of humans born of Homo Sapiens parents, are interned in schools across the U.S. which are in fact concentration camps designed to separate the hated children from a hysterical general populous. In this atmophere of government-sanctioned fear and loathing, scientists Mitch Rafelson, Kay Lang Rafelson and their Homo Sapiens Novus daughter Stella Nova, are living off-the-grid in Virginia. Stella's parents are desperately trying to protect their teenage daughter from capture by bounty hunters and imprisonment or worse in one of the camps. Stella, however, craves the company of her own kind and this impels her to run away, regardless of the consequences. Meanwhile, "virus hunter" Christopher Dicken finds himself quarantined in one of the schools in Ohio along with hundreds of virus children, most of whom are dying of a mysterious disease that is afflicting these new-and-improved humans across the country. Dicken must find the cause of the disease before frightened government forces and civilian populations decide to "sterilize" the site by killing all of the inhabitants.
All in all, I found Darwin's Children to have more action than Darwin's Radio, which at times felt a little bogged down with scientific detail. This helps the plot move along at a brisk pace, though there is still a great deal of technical jargon, debate, and hypothesizing. This is not a criticism, though. By repeatedly demonstrating his familiarity and understanding of complex scientific theories and their possible or even probable outcomes, Greg Bear creates a story that you realize could actually happen in the real world, and this is both compelling and terrifying.
Whether or not you buy into the "virus theory of evolution," the author's depiction of humanity's reaction to these new children is completely believable and terribly ominous. The description of the schools reminded me very much of descriptions of government-run Indian Schools from the late-19th and early-20th century. Those schools, likethe schools in this novel, were attempts by the majority to create conformity among the children of a feared and hated minority, thereby stamping out their sense of identity and rendering them impotent. It didn't work in real-life and it doesn't work in this novel, either, though it did create great suffering and resentment amongst both the children and their beleaguered parents. This in turn creates a backlash. Art imitates life.
You may find you appreciate Darwin's Children more if you read Darwin's Radio first. So much of this book is an extention of the developments of its predecessor that you might be confused if you pick it up cold. But by all means, pick it up, for Darwin's Children is science fiction at it's best. Check it out!
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