ABSTRACT
In Greg Bear’s Nebula Award-winning science fiction novel Darwin’s Radio, the sudden activation of an endogenous retrovirus in the human genome, ominously named SHEVA, 1 causes inexplicable symptoms in women all over the world. Women first become pregnant with an extremely malformed fetus, which looks more like “an ovary with a blood supply” (118); next, in this second ovary, a new embryo starts to develop. Although medical specialists claim that SHEVA pregnancies lead to miscarriage, there are rumors of viable SHEVA babies. Scientists discover that the retrovirus is sexually transmitted, much like the AIDS virus. Without really understanding how it works, the US Centers of Disease Control quickly label it a pandemic disease. Against the grain of the official view, American genomicist Kay Lang comes up with a more spectacular diagnosis: rather than a disease, SHEVA is the trigger for a sudden and rapid metamorphosis of the human species. Kay describes the genome as an “evolutionary computer” (101) or, as the title runs, “Darwin’s Radio,” picking up and decoding environmental signals and adapting the species to a rapidly changing world. What follows is a fast-paced scientific thriller in which Kay desperately tries to convince the medical community of her theory, while official discourse carefully suppresses any professional or public doubt about the “fact” of a pandemic crisis―a crisis that is financially and politically profitable to the Centers of Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health, the federal government, and others. By the end of the novel, Kay Lang and her partner have a child together―the first officially reported SHEVA child―and call it Stella Nova. They immediately notice that Stella has new bodily features, including the ability to speak from birth and to emit odors that soothe humans around her. Kay speculates that these features will allow a new generation of humans to cope with the pressures caused by augmented population and information density.
