Book Reports

I finished a couple of books in the last few weeks.

Darwin's Children, by Greg Bear, is the sequel to Darwin's Radio. I've read a number of other books by Mr. Bear and with the exception of W3 Women in Deep Time I feel confident recommending them all(Slant, the Eon Series). In the Darwin series, Bear asks what if the human race were on the verge of being replaced by the next evolutionary leap. Speculative genetic science and a dark view of the United States citizens and government hurl the protagonists through the story. It's a good read. The research that Mr. Bear puts into the Science behind his stories is evident, and he has a knack for being able to explain it to the lay person without dwelling on it to the expense of the rest of the story.
Where the sequel diverges from the original is its inclusion of spirituality. One of the main characters has an epiphany, feeling as though she is being directly touched by God. The story handles it maturely, exploring the emotional roller coaster this sort of experience subjects a person to. I'd be curious to discover what happened in the four years between the publishing of Radio and Children to make Mr. Bear decide to explore a topic like this in a work that had previously been grounded in pure science. Did he have such an epiphany himself, or did he stumble across the phenomenon of epiphanies while researching something else? Was he intrigued by the existence of God, or does the concept of a consistent unexplainable phenomenon happening to different people who have never met interest him more?
I've also just discovered that Slant is the last in a series of four. I need to get to the bookstore and find the first three.

Orion. Ben Bova. I don't believe I've read any of the author's other works, and I don't believe I will either. Orion is a monorail going over flat ground. The author spends as much time and detail on describing the character's feelings for a dead lover as he does listing the contents of a Neanderthal's rucksack. The time travel premises explored in the book are intriguing, but I think Mr. Bova could have gotten more mileage out of using them in a short story rather than a full length novel.