DNF. Gave up at page 200, despite my misgivings. A complicated mess of a novel with no clear direction. The initial first chapters were promising, but the story kept changing with no real direction. ( )

255

Vitals by Greg Bear
I remember the fact of having read this book (in 2008), but no more than that. There’s something about “the little mothers” that resonated with me—and frightened me and stuck with me. It was only recently that I stumbled upon the book again and it all came back and inspired me to re-read Bear’s warning.

In 2003 Greg Bear painted a horrific picture of how humans could be manipulated by the very bacteria that make us what we are, much less keep us alive. While the basic story focuses on the mitochondria that form the basis of our genetic make-up, it’s only now that we can see how our gut bacteria are molding our physical and mental health…and desires. And that’s what makes this story so frightening. In “Vitals” Bear describes how the average man/woman on the street can be influenced to try to kill the protagonist and force him to try to hide from everyone—because he knows that anyone/everyone is capable of destroying him. How do you hide from ‘everyone’? Who can you trust? What does he know that makes him so dangerous to “someone”? This is a dark and gloomy tale with no real ending. And all the more exciting for being a bit prescient.

In Michael Pollan’s book “Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation”, his chapter on fermentation provides a most succinct statement of what we should be aware of, and why, while avoiding any scaremongering. And I definitely recommend “Super Gut” by Dr. William Davis, for more detail of how humans are manipulated by our gut bacteria for their own ends; and how to use them intentionally for our own ends. In fact, Davis gave me the strength to eliminate almost all sugar from my diet when he pointed out that my craving for sugar was caused by a particular bacteria, that feeds on sugar, manipulating me to “want” sugar…with all its negative effects on my body. After working with his recommended “good” bacteria for a few weeks I’ve come to accept his claims by seeing my “cravings” disappear.

And that’s why “Vitals” is so scary. Look up “Toxoplasma gondii” and read how this parasite manipulates mice so that they allow themselves to be eaten by cats so that the parasite can complete its life-cycle within the cat’s body. For sure, I don’t believe we have any real danger of someone gaining control over us in this way, but Bear’s story might frighten you into putting more attention into what you eat from now on.

review of
Greg Bear's Vitals
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - June 10, 2015

For the full review go here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/399682-tatistics

As I was reading this, I thought something to the effect of: 'I shd finally give something by Bear a 5 star rating' [maybe I already have?] but, then, when I'm finished, I think.. NAH.. no matter how good it is it just doesn't tip the profound meter - although I'm sure that I've given other bks 5 star ratings that haven't either.

When I came across the Vietnam vet & the FBI as heros in this I was reminded of Bear's later Quantico (2006) wch I reviewed here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1440240.Quantico . In that review, I took Bear to task by saying:

"He's a wishful thinker: the American Dream, yeah, it's been a nightmare.. but, c'mon, we're really the good guys in the long run n'at.

"AND I ALMOST AGREE - but only ALMOST. Ultimately, for me, there's a 'dream' of people, just PEOPLE, not just 'Americans', of justice - &, sorry, FBI agents (as heroicized in this bk) are not my idea of the ones who have this dream most firmly ensconced in their noggins. They're just too embedded in American historical lies & mythology. Has Bear forgotten exactly how fucked Hoover was? How fucked COINTELPRO was? I'll take the non-racist version of the Black Panthers over the FBI anyday - even if they 'lack' the technology."

What's a little weird to me on the personal level here is that I remembered Quantico as a relevant thing to reference in this review as if I'd just read it recently. Instead, I read it 5 yrs ago. On the one hand, I can be proud of my memory. On the other hand, I'm more than a little disturbed by how much time-flies-when-you're-becoming-a-decrepit-old-man. The 5 yrs in my life that lapsed between 1977 & 1982 seem very long b/c my life changed so much in that time; the 5 yrs between when I read Quantico & when I read Vitals seems like very little time at all b/c my life's changed so little during it.

Anyway, maybe, just maybe, the FBI's chockfull of agents trying to turn around the nasty legacy of Hoover & Cointelpro, maybe there really are agents who're more interested in counteracting the addictive drugs & sex slavery foisted on us by greedy sociopathic criminal syndicates. Maybe these very hypothetical agents are recognizing that much of what anarchists criticize in society is actually accurate, that the big corporations really will stop at little or nothing to make a profit regardless of how much they ruin humanity-in-general & the environment.

Bear ends w/ "Many thanks to Special Agent Carl Jensen, FBI; Juliann Brunzell, Special Agent, Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension" (p 355) etc.. Who are these people? Did they help make Bear's law enforcement scenarios more realistic? Or more propagandistic?

Ok, Bear has the government & its agencies largely bought off by the villain here. Then he has rogue representatives from various agencies combatting them. That's standard thriller fare. Bear goes a step further, perhaps, by having "Dr. Val Candle", from the NSA, in this dialog:

""Who's going to tell us we can't live as long as we want?"

""They are," Candle said, pointing at the Lemuria. "Every rich son of a bitch, fat cat, church leader, yammering populist, self-righteous fascist, Communist, nationalist. They'll call it a sin. They'll make it illegal. But what they're really saying is"—she pointed a tense finger into the breeze—"it's wrong for everyone but me."" - p 308

Then he has "Nate Carsons", from the National Institutes of health say this:

""Chronovores," Carson said in disgust. "Plutocrats gobbling the feast and leaving scraps for the rest of us."" - p 309

Those are pretty speeches & maybe Bear knows people from those agencies who speak like that. It's a bit hard for me to take seriously. But I'm getting ahead of myself here. This novel's about a scientist researching life-extension. Life-extension's similar to hair-extension, you just glue some extra time on yr frayed ends. The scientist, Hal Cousins, goes to a billionaire to try to get funding:

"Six Dale Chihuly chandeliers hung behind the tinted glass, spaced evenly across the lobby like frozen purple-and-blue fireworks." - p 20

Nice. I admit it: I like Chihuly's glass work. A group of friends & I even made a movie called START heavily featuring their display at the Phipps Conservatory here in lovely Pittsburgh.

Bear's always excellent for keeping abreast of technology. Suck that teat, baby.

"The DSV" [Deep Sea Vehicle] "was equipped with a little railway system of steel weights that could be shifted fore and aft, or port and starboard, to adjust trim. This saved the sub from using thrusters, conserving power. The more power we kept in reserve, the longer we could stay on the bottom." - p 23

Nice, clever. On the subject of immortality: imagine all sorts of conflicting people being immortal, now imagine that being immortal doesn't mean that you necessarily recuperate quickly, just that you keep on going no matter how damaged yr body is, like zombies. Now imagine the immortals kicking the shit out of each other, just like we mortals do, & a bunch of ripped-apart sociopaths making life hell for the rest of us. Wait.. are we sure there aren't immortals now?

Speaking of not-unlikely scenarios:

"A cell phone rang on the nightstand. Data phones in the U.S. had been screwed up for weeks with viruses. I carried four with me, on four different systems, just to make sure: a PalmSec, an InfoBuddy, and two standard Nokias." - p 62

Bear does let loose some writerly humor from time-to-time: ""Hal Cousins, this is Kelly Bloom," Betty introduced. Shun, Bloom, Press . . . I was seeing a pattern here, all members of the Monosyllabic Verb club." (p 63) How do we know they're not hiding their suffixes? Y'know? Like the way yr file name might have ".doc" at the end or might not? If "A gerund is a noun made from a verb by adding "-ing."" ( http://www.englishpage.com/gerunds/part_1.htm ) maybe these are all double-agent gerunds. Pause for thought.

I love reading SF & having disciplines referred to that I know next-to-nothing about. It makes me feel like I'm learning something even when I really don't know shit. I just reviewed Joan Slonczewski's Brain Plague (2000) yesterday & today I'm reviewing Vitals (2002) - 2 biology-based SF bks. Maybe I can pretend to know something about biology in the future by making reference to cells w/o nuclei. It sounds important:

"But when we carefully plucked a cell from a feather-fan colony, froze and micro-sliced it, then mounted it for the lab's little electron microscope, Dan reported taht there were no nuclei whatsoever. The cell was a blob of jelly with unbounded circular chromosomes floating in a thick but simple membrane, and that in itself would make a variety of bacteria or archaea, neither of which sequester their DNA in nuclei." - p 70

Sounds anarchist to me, no centralized authority? Does that mean that anarchy leads to immortality? It's obviously not working for me. Bear has the doorman reading, one can only hope:

"Shivering, I banged on the condo's glass door and asked the liveried doorman to call a taxi. He looked up from the copy of Red Herring on his podium as if I were one of the thin parade of homeless drifting north from Seattle Center. He returned his attention to the magazine." - p 77

Ok, I have the January, 1977, issue of Red Herring. It's the 1st issue. It's published by some of the former editors of The Fox, another publication that I have the 1st issue of - in this case, signed by Michael Corris who gave me the issue. Bless you Michael Corris. Bear's having the uncaring doorman reading Red Herring may be a red herring, a false lead. Whatever it is, consider this quote from the editorial of the 1st issue:

"While it is true to say that most of our production and history is appropriated, this process is certainly never air-tight. In any struggle against such appropriation, progressive forces emerge and coalesce. there may be little we can do to stop this magazine from becoming another coffee-table class diversion; there is much we can do to make sure that isn't all it becomes. Of course the forms this struggle takes are of necessity transitional, as Red Herring is transitional."

In fact, I have to give Bear credit, he's full of surprises:

""What do you know about a man named AY3000?" Finn lifted a page on his small stack. "That apparently is his legal name."

""He changed it from Jack Scholl," I said. "He comes to conferences on nanotechnology and longevity research."

""Why did he change his name?"

""A stunt. Philosophy, I guess. AY stands for Apollo Year 3000, dating from the first moon landing, approximating his hoped-for life span." - p 84

It's tempting to change my name to AY∞ but what if I cursed myself w/ no way out?

It's funny how a snippet of description can evoke Hammett & Chandler for me:

"The greenhouse sat cater-cornered to the garage, behind a big old 1920 half-timber house, hidden from my view by junipers and haunted by the staccato tap-and-whisper of the nice old lady's slippers." - p 92

Bear takes a leap into a type of character realism that's difficult to pull off, he has a main character be prone to outbursts of anti-Semitism that make him repulsive to Hal & others that he's trying to ally himself w/.

""The true Illuminati. I've spent the last fifteen years tracking down its history. The damned Jews blocked me every step of the way."

"I stared at him intently. Thought about just getting up and leaving the bar. One problem with libertarians, scientific elitists. and other rugged individualists is that a significant minority of them hold odd and sometimes pernicious views about races and religions other than their own. Think The Bell Curve and you'll know the type." - p 105

Bear obviously wants to snipe at The Bell Curve. I haven't read the bk but judging, perhaps unfairly, from this snippet from Wikipedia, I'm inclined to appreciate Bear's snipe.

"The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life is a 1994 book by American psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein" [..] "and American political scientist Charles Murray. Herrnstein and Murray's central argument is that human intelligence is substantially influenced by both inherited and environmental factors and is a better predictor of many personal dynamics, including financial income, job performance, birth out of wedlock, and involvement in crime than are an individual's parental socioeconomic status, or education level. They also argue that those with high intelligence, the "cognitive elite", are becoming separated from those of average and below-average intelligence.

"The book was controversial, especially where the authors wrote about racial differences in intelligence and discussed the implications of those differences. The authors were reported throughout the popular press as arguing that these IQ differences are genetic." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve

Given that the Wikipedia article states that a central premise of the bk is that "Intelligence is one of, if not the most, important factors correlated to economic, social, and overall success in the United States, and its importance is increasing." I have to strongly disagree since I consider myself to be highly intelligent & highly economically unsuccessful. To me, it seems glaringly obvious that inherited wealth & an almost complete lack of socio-economic ethics are the 2 greatest factors in determining what is generally considered to be 'economic success'. Given that if one's parents are wealthy one is also likely to be wealthy that may present the false appearance of being primarily genetic - instead it's a matter of having one's cards stacked in one's favor followed by a willingness to always cheat.

However, Bear complicates his narrative by making many of his characters well-rounded enuf to never be simple villains. The anti-Semitic character wasn't always that way:

""I was subjected to mind-altering substances. My behavior changed."

""Yes."

""I lost all my money and my woman, and I was hounded out of academe. I became possessed." Banning looked as battered and drained of life as an old mannequin.

""By what?"

"He shrugged. "Let's just say that this is my afterlife, and it's hell. To all intents and purposes, I am a dead man."" - p 129

A part of the novel is about a Soviet gulag where political prisoners were experimented on:

"A few weeks after the special food arrived, the inhabitants of 38-J were walking naked in the streets, fornicating in public. Human meat—mostly children—was being sold in the butcher shops. Beria brought in truckloads of guns and gave them to every citizen. He showed off by walking unguarded through the streets in a town filled with armed dissidents and political prisoners who should have hated his guts.

"Squads took instructions by phone, or from planted neighbors, and hunted down people who visited the library, who were bald or bow-legged, who carried their babies in public. Some were told to go out and whistle and others were told to go out and shoot all of those who whistled." - p 136

Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria was, if one is to trust my brief research of him on Wikipedia, a real Russian historical figure: "Beria was the longest-lived and most influential of Stalin's secret police chiefs" "In August 1938, Stalin brought Beria to Moscow as deputy head of the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), the ministry which oversaw the state security and police forces. Under Nikolai Yezhov, the NKVD carried out the Great Purge: the imprisonment or execution of millions of people throughout the Soviet Union as alleged "enemies of the people."" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavrentiy_Beria

Presumably, "38-J" is Bear's fiction. I wonder, are there works of Russian fiction that have secret torture camps in the US as part of the story? If so, I'd like to read one (in English) & see if it has any basis in history. It's easy to lay genocide accurately at the feet of Stalin, who ruled the USSR from 1929 to 1953, b/c of this long reign of 24 yrs. It's my opinion that power inevitably corrupts & that the people attracted to it are so attracted precisely b/c of how they can abuse it.

Fortunately, no president in the US can rule for more than 8 yrs.. but sometimes I think of the Reagan/Bush era as reigning from 1980 to 2008 - 28 yrs, 4 yrs longer than Stalin (Clinton hardly counts as a break). I wonder what a Russian novelist wd make of:

the Multinational Force in Lebanon (1982-1984),
the Invasion of Grenada (1983),
the Invasion of Panama (1989–1990),
the Iraqi no-fly zones conflict (1991–2003),
the Somali Civil War (1992–1995),
the Intervention in Haiti (1994–1995),
the Bosnian War (1994–1995),
the Kosovo War (1998–1999),
the War in Afghanistan (2001–present),
the Iraq War (2003–2011),
& the War in North-West Pakistan (2004–present)

?!

- all wars engaged in by the US during what I'm calling the Reagan/Bush regime. Then, alas, we come to Obama's presidency where these 2 have been tacked on:

the Military intervention in Libya (2011),
& the Military intervention against ISIL (2014–present)

""They have turned germs into comrades and allies. They speak to them, and through them. They have opened a telephone line into the human psyche. This is power beyond imagination."

"—"Secret Report of Central Investigation Committee to Laventi Beria," 1937 (from the Golokhov papers, released by the Irkutsk University Committee for Openness and Historical Accuracy, August 16, 2001)" - p 174

Now, b/c Beria was a real historical character probably responsible for all sorts of horrors, the fictional element of this narrative is tinted w/ a dose of believability. "Irkutsk University Committee for Openness and Historical Accuracy" seems plausible enuf - & yet there probably is no such thing. As such, Bear gets into an awkward territory. It's easy enuf to justify such an approach to fiction as a strategy for deepening the reader's engagement but isn't he running the risk of muddying the waters of history?

""Rudy's books were pretty good once," I said. "He had a knack for sniffing out rare documents. But something happens after you dig into the thousandth official archive of intolerable brutality. Spiritual evil, as they say. But it's not demons, it's flesh-and-blood people doing the unimaginable, then recording it like you and I balancing our check-books. You come to mistrust everyone, and finally the paranoia kicks in. It can always happen again, you know. Ordinary people are out there waiting for the orgy to start. They lick their lips, waiting for the hate to flow. You study the twentieth century long enough, you want to pack a gun."" - p 179

Indeed. I'm always on about ROBOPATHS & their responsibility-free relationship to GENOCIDAL MEGALOMANIACS. The robopaths are the o"rdinary people" [..] "waiting for the" hate "orgy to start" &, alas, "It can always happen again, you know." I've lived thru the latter half of the 20th century & I don't want to pack a gun - but then I've been relatively lucky.

Bear seems to have a knack for dropping things in, like Red Herring & "AY3000" that perc my interest: "Rob snatched back his hand. "You're suffering from progeria," he said. "Premature aging. You're forty, tops."" (p 257) "Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria Syndrome ("Progeria", or "HGPS") is a rare, fatal genetic condition characterized by an appearance of accelerated aging in children." ( http://www.progeriaresearch.org/about_progeria/ ) Progeria is so rare that only 1 in about 8 billion live births have it. Imagine being that 1 in 8 billion.

"I thought of Nicolae Ceausescu, former dictator of Romania, recruiting his core bodyguards from orphanages, raising kids from childhood to serve in a kind of Praetorian Guard. He had been deposed and executed in 1989. His kids had supported him fanatically to the very end. they had to be put down like rabid dogs." - p 283

Ceausescu's history is fascinating. What wd it've been like if his guard wd've all been kids w/ progeria? Maybe he wd've died at a ripe old age reading Christian Bök's Xenotext Works to them as bedtime stories:

""NSA has been studying the potential for biological encryption. Our division is tasked to learn whether genomically coded messages can be or are being sent into our country in birds, insects, plants, or bacteria." - p 301

"The theory of aging described in this book is speculative. The concept of bacterial cooperation, however, is firmly established in scientific papers and books, including Bacteria as Multicellular Organisms, edited by James A. Shapiro and Martin Dworkin." - p 355

Fuck it, I'm giving this one 5 stars, it was too well-researched to deserve less & he mentioned Red Herring. ( )

Bear, Greg. Vitals. Del Rey, 2002.
Sometimes a good premise just isn’t enough. Vitals begins with a crew exploring deep sea volcanic vents for hoping to find primitive forms of life that may provide clues to the human aging process. All this is well explained, but then, most unfortunately, the plot moves into high gear and the novel becomes a true mess. I can buy that our hero’s brother might be murdered to find the secrets hidden in the biological research, but super villains appear, and the action gets hard to follow. When you can follow it, you wonder why you wonder why bothered. Greg Bear has done much better—almost always. ( )