Subject: Review: Bios by Robert Charles Wilson

From: "Aaron M. Renn" <[email-masked]>
Date: 08 Nov 1999 15:08:35 -0500

Bios by Robert Charles Wilson
	Review Copyright (c) 1999 Aaron M. Renn

Conclusion: Should have been a novella

I greatly enjoyed last year's Hugo nominee Darwinia, so was eagerly
awaiting the latest novel from Wilson.  Unfortunately, Bios disappoints.
Wilson really only had one good idea in this book, and it wasn't
sufficient to carry a novel length work, even a short one like Bios.  This
one should have been done as a novella.

In the future, humanity is ruled by an interconnected set of megacorporate
Trusts and a handful of aristocratic Families.  Only a few scattered
settlements in the Kuiper Belt remain nominally independent.  Earth is
poor, life is depressing.  Against this backdrop, humanity is exploring
the world Isis.  Isis is a planet of a reasonably nearby star system that
has a rich amount of life, extending all the way up to the nearly sentient
level.  Unfortunately, this life is uniformly deadly.  The evolution of
this planet followed a much more competitive path than ours, and humans
simply can't compete.  Any exposure to the air and the microbes will do an
almost instant ebola on your ass.  Zoe Fisher gets sent to Isis in order
to test out a new type of enviro-suit that might be able to replace the
bulky and unwieldy models now used.

As with Darwinia, there's a world out there that might be fascinating to
explore, but we actually get to see very little of it.  That's in spite of
the book being subtitled "A Novel of Planetary Exploration."  Wilson only
uses the world as a prop to develop his ideas about the nature of
consciousness.  The characters mostly aren't very well drawn or very
interesting.  The mysteries and conspiracies weren't very impressive
either.  I personally got the impression that Wilson was merely beefing up
a novella in order to get it up to the bare minimum length needed for a
novel.  At $23 for a hardcover, the price performance just isn't there for
this one, though it might be worth picking up in paperback.

%A Wilson, Robert Charles
%T Bios
%I Tor
%D 1999-11
%G ISBN 0-312-86857-X
%P 208 pp.
%O hardcover, US$22.95

Aaron M. Renn ([email-masked]) http://www.urbanophile.com/arenn/