After struggling through Manifesta, what I clearly needed in my life was some good, thoroughly absorbing sci-fi. Nothing on my shelves was particularly tempting, but a quick trip to the used bookstore turned up a copy of Darwin's Children, sequel to Darwin's Radio. I read Radio a few years ago on the recommendation of a friend and I absolutely loved it. It's the story of an evolution event in the human race. Suddenly men in committed relationships start expressing a virus that infects their partner, causing a reshuffling of genes producing offspring that are markedly different from their parents. People, of course, freak right the hell out. Well, Children picks up the story a few years after where Radio left off. The majority of the "virus children," as they are called, have been herded into special schools where they can be isolated from the rest of the human race. The children are nearly adolescence, and people are terrified that as they reach sexual maturity, that they will produce a virus that will wipe out the "old humans." Greg Bear follows the children, their parents, doctors, scientists, bureaucrats and elected officials as they fight to make sense out of all that's happening.

My favorite thing about Greg Bear is that he writes what is known as "hard sci-fi," where the fiction is based on hard science. He's clearly done a lot of research for these books, in anthropology, archeology, genetics, evolution... You actually learn things as you read. Of course, a lot of what I learned were fairly obscure scientific theories that do not enjoy widespread acceptance in the scientific community, but most of the time, those theories are more interesting anyway. Also, at the end of Children, Bear includes a section on references and how to go about learning more on these topics.

And like all good sci-fi, the exploration of what humanity would do faced with such an extraordinary circumstance is illuminating. There is no shortage of parallels between his world and ours. The concentration of power into the hands of those who can successfully manipulate our fears, our willingness to sacrifice those who are not like us for "the common good," the control and censorship of science for political ends... Really good sci-fi doesn't just change how you think about the future, it changes how you think about the present.