Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN num: 9780007132386
ISBN number: 0007132387
Label: HarperCollins Publishing houses Ltd
Manufacturer: HarperCollins Publishing houses Ltd
Page Count: 480
Printing Date: March 01, 2004
Publishing house: HarperCollins Publishing houses Ltd
Sale Popularity Level: 2811413
Studio: HarperCollins Publishing houses Ltd
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Product Description:
In Greg Bear's stunning new thriller, nature is more of a bitch goddess than a kindly mother, and evolution is no longer just a theory -- it's an urgent and dangerous fact. In DARWIN'S CHILDREN, human society is about to get a complete makeover. A new kind of humanity is growing up. Some call them the Virus Children. They are special children, equipped with significant natural upgrades that allow them to communicate and socialize in ways we can hardly imagine, or resist. Charming, gentle, persuasive, beautiful...in them can be seen a future that may make all of human history until now seem clumsy and brutal. As products of an extraordinary evolutionary event called SHEVA that swept through the population like a contagious disease over a decade ago, they carry ancient viruses that could cause our extinction, viruses that may be triggered at any moment by stress, anger...or puberty. The new children are being methodically rounded up and sequestered in special schools where they are studied, measured and biopsied. Stella Nova, the daughter of Kaye Lang and Mitch Rafelson, is one of them. She is driven by instinct to be with her own kind, to establish a new kind of social order and discover her potential. Kaye and Mitch wish to protect her, but to do so, they must keep her isolated, stifled in a blanket of security that they all know must eventually be lifted. Despite their best efforts, Kaye, Mitch, and Stella are tracked by security forces that could break them apart as a family. The new children must be controlled, these forces believe; and the time may come when both species must either separate, or engage in outright war. In DARWIN'S CHILDREN, human society is about to get a complete makeover, and who will win is anyone's guess. For, as Kaye Lang discovers, silence is also a signal...
Amazon.com Review:
Darwin's Children, Greg Bear's follow-up to Darwin's Radio, is top-shelf science fiction, thrilling and intellectually charged. It's no standalone, though. The plot and characters are certainly independent of the previous novel, but the background in Darwin's Radio is essential to nonbiologists trying to understand what's going on. The subsequent stage of human evolution has arrived, announced by the birth of bizarre 'virus children.' Now the children with the hypersenses and odd faces are growing up, and the world has to figure out what to do with them. The answer is evil and all too human, as governments put the kids in camps to protect regular folks from imagined dangers. Mitch and Kaye, scientists whose daughter Stella is swept up in the fray, become unwillingly involved in the politics that erupt around the issue of the new humans. Harrowing chases, gun battles, epidemics, and tense meetings about civil rights ensue, all brilliantly narrated. But just when you think you've got the book figured out, Bear throws a massive curveball by introducing... religion. That's right, a good old-fashioned epiphany, plopped down in the middle of a hard science fiction novel. But even skeptical readers will be swept along with Kaye as she tries to deal with what's happening to her and how it relates to the fate of her daughter's species. Keep reading past the words that make you uncomfortable--the hot science, the cool spirituality--and you'll be rewarded with a story of complete and moving humanity. --Therese Littleton
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Rated by buyers 
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Most of the science of the previous novel is already established. This book focuses on civilization's response. Various government officials--through a combination of not understanding science and mindless careerism--manage to institutionalize all known new children. It is futile for them to do this, because the gist of the previous book is that eventually their own descendants will be the new type of humanity.
As the novel progresses the children grow up and we learn just what this subsequent evolutionary step is supposed to be. The new types are mostly psychologically different than humans. They cooperate differently, their fight or flight instincts seem to be wired differently, and they acquire language more readily. From an evolutionary standpoint this makes sense, as most of the pressures humans have faced for the last few thousand years have been from each other, whether through violence, economic competition, or trying to out-lawyer each other.
Rated by buyers 
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One of the most boring books I have ever seen in print.
Nothing happens.
Years of story time pass...and nothing happens.
Familiar characters from Darwin's Radio...remain exactly the same, doing exactly the same jobs and stuck in exactly the same contrived, unbelievable politics...despite decades of story time passing. No new science is introduced and the only new character (and the only interesting character) is Stella Nova, who grows up and reveals some weakly thought out changes the SHEVA children go through.
The book hinges on hopeless, repressive prejudice (behaviors inconsistent with epidemics seen in the last 1000 years), an archaeological miracle identical to the one in the very first book, then suddenly, and with no connection to the rest of the book, everything magically gets better in the last 40 pages, a dues-ex-machina that seems to be telling the reader: "and some time passed and everyone got happy again."
There is also an annoying, poorly written, religious thread that wastes fifty or more pages which adds nothing to the book, nothing to the speculative element, nothing to the characters and appears to be nothing but some rambling born-again-Christian fluff. Is Bear a born again? It would explain a lot of what is wrong with this book.
This book is definitely not worth reading, and really wasn't even worth killing trees to print
Rated by buyers -
I'm pretty dissappointed. I had read Eon and that was pretty ok. Not exactly the bleeding edge of hard sci fi, but ok.
Darwin's children has poorly explained science ideas, 1 dimensional characters and really offensive religious and political rhetoric.
The main character, a scientist, has a bizzarre and senseless god friend. The none-too-subtle predictions of an impending police state would be fine, if they didn't try to piggy back on mawkish sympathy for a non-existent (and utterly unbelievable) human species. I guess the moral of the story is that if we should suddenly have a generation's worth of really tall freckled kids we should NOT put such kids into concentration camps.
I mean I've heard that republicans are bad, but concentration camps?! For children!?
And yeah this new species isnt even explained or described hardly at all. We know they rely on scent alot for communication. Aside from being slightly gross, it's unclear in what way exactly the "virus children" represent the subsequent evolutionary step.
O yeah and the most most MOST annoying aspect is Mitch's whole "homo sap as cultural animal" spiel. Literally, in the same paragraph, he "recalls" that chimps eat other species of monkey while insisting its perfectly natural that that humans befriend hypothetical extinct non-sapient hommes.
Bleh
Rated by buyers -
This was a good follow up to Darwin's radio. If you liked the very first one, you'll like this book also.
Rated by buyers -
This is a very short review but to the point, as the author of The Second Virgin Birth, I must say that, Darwin's Childrem, is well written with a well thought out plot line that holds you interest the entire book. I enjoyed reading it.
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