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Title: Not Greg Bear's best!
Review: Writing as a fan of Greg Bear and many of his previous books, I have to say that this is not one of his best. The premise of an evolutionarily important retrovirus embedded in our genes that drives a sort of punctutated evolution is interesting, but Bear does not pull it off. His book struggles as an unsuccessful mix of a hard science fiction story about a possible new revelation in biology and a story of a relationship between two of the principal characters in the plot. Furthermore, the decidedly anticlimactic ending left me cold, with only a superficial description of the supposed next stage in human evolution, which didn't even seem that remarkable given the long build-up. Disappointing.
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