Lonely researcher develops cells capable of intelligence.
Bosses tell researcher to stop the project.
Researcher does not stop.
Bosses fire him and confiscate his research.
Researcher injects cells into his own body to smuggle them out of the lab.
Everybody dies.
He had never been good at gauging the consequences of his actions.
This is a pandemic story, it's a story of evolution, and it's an apocalypse, but more than anything, this is one of those books that starts you with a set of characters only to abandon them completely part way into the story and finish the story with a completely different set of characters.
It's almost always an unpleasant feeling when an author does this, even if the characters you began with were somewhat repulsive. Having them taken away from you and being forced into familiarity with other, new characters who you may not have even heard of before. Few authors can really pull it off.1 It helps if you have a really good reason.
Greg Bear's reason is that all the characters he started the story with have been melted down into cellular material to be used by a new civilization that is reshaping the face of the earth.2
The concept of an intelligent disease (which is really a misnomer, but Bear himself relies on it several times) is fabulous. But instead of really delving into this idea and enjoying the tension of it, Bear whisks us away to a metaphysical confabulation about how theory is more real than reality and it all ends up feeling very much like that Jodi Foster movie, Contact3--which I don't recommend. He sucks all the tension out of the story so it feels like a flabby pool floatie that's lost half its air. He does, however, manage a few good turns of phrase:
Vergil Ulam was turning into a galaxy.
At a crude guess, perhaps two trillion fully developed, intelligent individuals exist within me.
It's a fun read if you don't mind getting theoretical.4
Footnotes
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Walter M Miller does it in A Canticle for Leibowitz when he spans thousands of years between chapters, and Robert Forward does it well in Dragon's Egg when he tells the story of a sesame-seed sized life form as it evolves from cave-sesame seeds to hyper-intelligent star-shapers. Both are recommended reading. ↩
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Not a good enough reason. ↩
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This is the trouble with aliens: if they really are alien, we probably won't even recognize them as life. So what writers often end up with are monsters...or just more humans. It's incredibly difficult to deliver on anything else (although some authors do: Octavia Butler comes very close in Lillith's Brood. Therefore, if you plan on writing science fiction it's best to remember that great wisdom of Star Trek: All the best aliens look just like humans (plus maybe a little bit of face paint). ↩
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I'm afraid this may be one of the most damning things I've ever said about a story. I don't mean it quite so harshly as it sounds. ↩