- Paperback: 272 pages
- Publisher: Ace Books; First THUS edition (31 Dec 1999)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0441006671
- ISBN-13: 978-0441006670
- Product Dimensions: 17 x 10.7 x 2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 5,698,670 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
Format:Paperback
Kanaly's venture into the world of Big Ideas continues in this follow-up book to his impressive first novel, THOUGHTS OF GOD. In GOD, the author takes you on a journey through the cosmos, into the twisted heart of Man, and the provocative mind of God. In VIRUS CLANS, the journey is reversed, as the story deals with the smallest parts of life, the lowly virus, and its impact on evolution, both on Earth and in the Universe. Kanaly stretches the boundaries of respectable science, and in so doing stretches the boundaries of the reader's imagination. Bring your brain to this one, you'll have to think. But as in THOUGHTS OF GOD, the intensity, the insights, the expansive scope of the story makes it well worthwhile. A startlingly good book.
Format:Paperback
Kanaly's first book, "Thoughts of God," was good. This one isn't. At first, the vignettes of non-human life (ants, aliens, and so on) are impressive, but they're too short and sketchy to draw you into the story, and they never come together into anything more than fragments. They quickly become annoying and predictable. The human characters are too flat to pull you into the story either. And there's almost no glimpse of the viruses themselves. Since the idea of virus clans drew me to the book in the first place, I was frustrated when they never really appeared in the story. The writing is overloaded with sentence fragments and maddening repetitions. It was hard to stick with this book, and when I finished it, I wished I'd dumped it halfway through. It went nowhere, and left me depressed and stupefied. I almost called this review "Invasion of the Space Brain Virus Mutants," but that would make the book sound more interesting than it is. The ending does have a comic-book quality, though.
"Virus Clans" fails as science fiction, as thriller, as philosophical meditation. Read Crichton, Richard Preston, D. Preston and L. Child, or "Childhood's End" instead. Or read "Orgy of the Blood Parasites" by Kim Newman. It's got an even cooler title than "Virus Clans," and it's a hell of a lot more fun.
Format:Paperback
-The Hartford CourantVIRUS CLANS is all of that and more. The really terrifying part of this book comes about halfway through, when you suddenly realize that the author has you believing that this incredible scenario could possibly be true--that viruses, through billions of years of trial and error mutation, are actually fueling evolution on Earth. The book follows what might be the next evolutionary step for humans and the Virus Clans, whose own history is traced back to the first bacterium and beyond, into the cosmos itself. The story is both believable and convincing! Kanaly takes established scientific fact and moves it into the wide open arena of speculative fiction. For example, different insect species do, in fact, communicate using encoded protein molecules--so why not viruses? Recent studies on the human brain indicate an as yet unknown relationship between memory and protein molecules. VIRUS CLANS is a fusion of fact and fiction, of unique story-tellng and introspection. Turn the last page, and you will never look at the world the same way again. Poweful, highly recommended!
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Reads like James P. Hogan on a bad day.
Truly awful; reads like James P. Hogan on a bad day. It's all there: the explanation of the Big Questions, the wooden characters, and the total absence of any understanding of the... Read more
Published on 3 May 1998
Roll over Mr. Darwin.
Compelling, intelligent, thought provoking and highly entertaining. What more can you ask from such a superb piece of speculative fiction? Read more
Published on 1 Mar 1998
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