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Brain Plague (Elysium Cycle)

by Joan Slonczewski (Goodreads Author)

4.04 of 5 stars 4.04 · rating details · 182 ratings · 21 reviews

Brain Plague is the new hard SF novel by Joan Slonczewski, set in the same future universe as her award-winning A Door into Ocean and The Children Star (a New York Times Notable Book). An intelligent microbe race that can live symbiotically in other intelligent beings is colonizing the human race throughout the civilized universe. And each colony of microbes has its own pe...more

Paperback, 384 pages

Published March 15th 2001 by Tom Doherty Associates (first published 2000)

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May 10, 2012 Jennifer rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction, sf, owned

Oh, how I love Joan Slonczewski and the Door Into Ocean universe! So much so that I somehow got two copies of this from paperbackswap. Ooops. Once I got the second copy in the mail, it was clearly time to start reading one of them.

I believe this is the fourth book in the Elysium Cycle. It takes place soon after The Children Star. Like that book, this one continues to explore what it means to be sentient. Taking place back on Valedon, we follow an artist, Chrys, as Valans struggle to adapt to th...more

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Mar 15, 2011 Lori L (She Treads Softly) rated it 4 of 5 stars

Brain Plague by Joan Slonczewski is the forth book in the Elysium Cycle Series (the other three are A Door Into Ocean, Daughter of Elysium, and The Children Star) but it is also a stand-alone science fiction novel. In many ways Brain Plague encompasses a treatise on symbiotic relationships between individuals and societies, nanotechnology (with the microbes), artistic creativity, free will and personal responsibility, and what it means to be a god.

On the planet Valedon a struggling artist, Chry...more Brain Plague by Joan Slonczewski is the forth book in the Elysium Cycle Series (the other three are A Door Into Ocean, Daughter of Elysium, and The Children Star) but it is also a stand-alone science fiction novel. In many ways Brain Plague encompasses a treatise on symbiotic relationships between individuals and societies, nanotechnology (with the microbes), artistic creativity, free will and personal responsibility, and what it means to be a god.

On the planet Valedon a struggling artist, Chrysoberyl (Chrys), agrees to be colonized by Eleutherian Micros, an race of intelligent, sentient microbes. The Micros live just beneath the skull, in the arachnoid, a web of tissue between the outer linings of the brain. They communicate with her neurally and live an accelerated life -something like an hour for us is a year to them.

Chrys accepts the Eleutherians Micros originally for better health care and a healthy bank account, as well as protection against the other, plague carrying Micros but soon they are helping her with her art, and serving as collaborators all while living a very accelerated life. Chrys' Micros can be helpful, annoying and rebellious.

While parts of the novel are very intriguing it does become bogged down as Chrys deals with her own rebellious Micros and the ever present and repeated threat of Plague-carrying slaves. Even though I liked the concept of worlds within worlds and enjoyed Brain Plague in many ways, I'm not sure it was entirely successful for me.

The biggest problem I had was the flaw I perceived in communication between humans and their Micros. Chrys and her Micros talked in real time to each other and other carriers but the Micros are supposed to be living a very accelerated life which, logically, makes that communication impossible to accept. Additionally, she would also threaten them with an eclipse (shutting her eyes for a short period of time) but that darkness would already be happening when she slept. I also became very tired of the word "plast." If I were giving numbers, this is a 3.5 -
Highly recommended - as long as you overlook the inconsistencies involving the accelerated time for the Micros. http://shetreadssoftly.blogspot.com/

(less)

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Jun 28, 2012 Ward Bond added it · review of another edition

EDITORIAL REVIEW: Brain Plague is the new hard SF novel by Joan Slonczewski, set in the same future universe as her award-winning A Door into Ocean and The Children Star (a New York Times Notable Book). An intelligent microbe race that can live symbiotically in other intelligent beings is colonizing the human race throughout the civilized universe. And each colony of microbes has its own personality, good or bad. In some people, carriers, they are brain enhancers, and in others a fatal brain pla

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Jun 23, 2009 Samantha rated it 4 of 5 stars

I really liked this book, which picked up where The Children Star left off. All of the books in the series have crazy strange worlds that you get pulled into, but Brain Plague has a nice protagonist that you like and want to see do well in the situations that she finds herself in. I'm not sure if I'd like it as much if I hadn't read the Children Star, because it provided a good introduction to micropeople, and all their weirdness. This is probably my second favorite in the series, I liked Daught...more

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Apr 26, 2012 Elf M. rated it 3 of 5 stars

It's not often that I re-read a book that, while I enjoyed it, I had a struggle doing so. However, several of Joan Slonczewski's fans, one of whom I trust quite a bit, encouraged me to re-read her book Brain Plague.

The basic plot is straightforward: a middle-tier artist who has moved to her interstellar empire's capital world to be part of the art scene is accepted for an "experimental" medical procedure that, she is told, will boost her intellectual capabilities. While this is going on, a "bra...more It's not often that I re-read a book that, while I enjoyed it, I had a struggle doing so. However, several of Joan Slonczewski's fans, one of whom I trust quite a bit, encouraged me to re-read her book Brain Plague.

The basic plot is straightforward: a middle-tier artist who has moved to her interstellar empire's capital world to be part of the art scene is accepted for an "experimental" medical procedure that, she is told, will boost her intellectual capabilities. While this is going on, a "brain plague" is moving through the population at large, a blood-borne disease that turns people into zombies who either die or mysteriously disappear. Our heroine discovers that what she is getting is, in fact, a colony of millions of sentient beings who live at speeds hundreds of times faster than she does, and their 'boost' is in fact her leeching off of their creative efforts. They don't mind, though: they can only live within a human host and she, in effect, becomes their "god," and all they do is for her well-being. The plague, it turns out, is made up of corrupt colonies of these beings who take control of their hosts pleasure centers, addicting their hosts and sending them on an involuntary religious quest to find "the Eternal Light."

From here, much personal and political hijinks ensue.

There are several problems with Brain Plague, not the least of which is the fact that Slonczewski's culture, as it is depicted, should have disappeared up the Singularity centuries ago. It's depicted as a benevolent Empire of some sort, a capitalist structure that's allowed to flourish as long as it pays its taxes. Medical technology apparently allows for the most Banksian of body modifications, but the best tech only extends human life by two centuries. They have nanotechnology in abundance-- their buildings are grown, not built, for example-- but our heroine lives near a slum and, upon getting rich off of her colony's efforts, volunteers one night a week in a soup kitchen. The wealthy suffer from problems that any capitalist worth his salt would have solved with the technology at hand-- and made a bundle doing so.

The distinctions in Brain Plague are artificial : there are uplifted apes, ordinary humans, enhanced humans, hivers of a sort, sentient robots, and super-sentient AIs "who think such deep thoughts that they never deign to use human speech." And never shall the twain intertwine, apparently. Although one human and one sentient robot are depicted as "married," as are one human and one uplifted ape, any shades of grey between the two are viciously suppressed by authorial fiat in order to create inter-identity-group conflicts and politics. The characters in Brain Plague never learned Vinge's Law: "The last thing we will have to do as a species is make a machine smarter than we are." Slonczewski's characters are morally suspect: there's no particular reason that the rich need their doors and windows to be independently sentient beings, and her depiction of serving robots "kept just below the complexity at which they might 'wake up'" struck a false tone in the face of current AI research.

Almost everyone in the book is bisexual. The only strictly heterosexual character-- a character given to Liberace-esque self-aggrandizement-- is pelted in every scene he is mentioned with the epithet "medieval." He's also conveniently dead and therefore can't defend himself; his story is told in news reports and flashbacks. To add insult to injury, it turns out he was incompetent as well. The more I think about it, the more annoyed I become with it: the "war of the sexes" can be reduced to the "wrestling match of the sexes: play hard, play fair, nobody hurt" without making gender irrelevant or trivial, but Slonczewski chose instead a convention as artificial and as unrealistic as the New Soviet Man Thesis.

Slonczewski's story is supposed to be "of the far future" but, if it is, then the future was depressingly static for a long, long time. The book opens with a Future That Is Like The Present, Only Moreso. By the end of the book, interesting possibilities suggest themselves, but only suggest. Slonczewski is a very competent writer: her scenes flow, her plot works from her first principles, her characterizations are strong. But I found some of the lesser themes in her work bizarre if not downright irrational.

I was hoping, upon re-reading, to discover that I had read the story incorrectly. I had not. Instead, I found the story even more bizarre. The characters flit from starsystem to starsystem in starships as casually as you and I take a subway. Sentient AIs have a scatological problem: mentioning "waste heat" is even more offensive to them than any epithet human beings use among themselves. Despite the enormous variance among the AI characters, they're all trying to found a city on a planet for AIs only just to show the protein machines that they can. There is no investment scheme targeting poor villagers living on the backward from which heroine Chrys comes, exploring the economic value of an entire planet that it's quite cheap to exploit, no capitalist at work trying to make the universe more productive. The economy, the social structure, the moral milieu, everything about this universe exists only by authorial fiat.

There is a class of writer that does not understand how the world came to be the way it is. She looks around and see class divisions and economic segmentation and doesn't understand why those institutions exist-- and then she extrapolates, badly, from the existing to an analogous SFnal setting. Slonczewski has done that with Brain Plague, but in the process she has given her class segments and economic segments (or their progenitors) capabilities that should destroy and re-arrange the distinctions with which she's trying to analogize.

Slonczewski remains a great writer of characters and their relationships (except when she doesn't; she does a poor job of communication Chrys's social life, using it primarily as an excuse to drive her into the grubbier bars), but she introduces ideas willy-nilly into her story without really grasping the consequences of her actions.(less)

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Jan 24, 2012 Kirk Sluder rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: sci-fi, feminist, read-more-than-once, biology, gltb-friendly, lgbt

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. I read this back when it was first published and felt the need to revisit it again, even to the point of buying two different copies of it.

Starving artist Chrysoberyl agrees as part of an experimental protocol to become the host to a community of sentient microbes. The specific strain she gets, Eutheria, turns out to be highly temperamental and creative. There is more than a bit of science fiction handwavium in the medicine and biology involved, but it gets right to the meat of the issue.

Most o...more

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Aug 05, 2009 Christy rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: dissertation, science-fiction-and-fantasy, 21st-century-american-lit

This is an entertaining read with plenty of interesting developments; however, after reading, teaching, and loving Slonczewski's A Door Into Ocean, which is a careful examination of nonviolence and gender, philosophically interesting as well as carried along by an interesting plot, Brain Plague falls short.

The central character, Chrysoberyl, is an artist who chooses to become a carrier of the "brain plague" (really not a disease but a colony of "micropeople" who live in the brain and communicat...more

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Nov 11, 2012 Joe rated it 4 of 5 stars

Kenyon College Microbiology professor Slonczewski writes a pretty light, interesting, and fun to read novel that relies on microorganisms, cellular biology, and genetics for the impetus of the story rather than the physics, computer science, and engineering concepts that drive most sci-fi. I did notice that the male characters are totally one-dimensional but I suppose that's fair play considering how terribly written most female characters are in sci-fi, haha

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May 12, 2011 Jenn Myers rated it 5 of 5 stars

Probably one of my all-time favourites. I really need to buy another copy and reread it before I give an in depth review, but I think about this book any time a book brings up computer AI or nano-technology.

The first time I bought this book, I bought it by accident - (It was the book of the month, and I forgot to check the "please do not send" box.) Man, what a happy accident it was though.

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Apr 17, 2013 Stephschiff rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2013, favorites, kindle, science-fiction

The Elysium Cycle series is one of the best I've ever read. I mourned the loss of the worlds and societies Slonczewski created when I finished Brain Plague. Start with Door Into Ocean, then Daughters of Elysium, The Children Star, and finally Brain Plague. I can't recommend this series enough!

I put it on the level of Asimov's Foundation series and the Pournelle-Niven Motie Series.

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Feb 23, 2010 Rantalica rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: sf

I loved this book, couldn't put it down. The idea seemed vaguely familiar - I must have read something similar to it, what exactly I cannot recall, and yes, it has been bugging me - but I think she did a really good job. I must admit I only read it because it had a Nancy Kress recommendation on the cover (I know, but still) and I love Kress' writing.

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Jul 27, 2011 Wendy rated it 2 of 5 stars

I almost put this down after 3 pages because the writing was so bad. But then I was bored one day and just picked it up. It was a good idea but it was a mess. There was no sex or swearing until the end, when suddenly there was a perfunctory, laughable sex scene. The main girl would sometimes put "like" in her sentences. Was she supposed to be a valley girl?

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Apr 09, 2011 Darceylaine rated it 3 of 5 stars

Really liked this one. I enjoyed how Slonczewski developed this story line about the ambiguities of sentience throughout the series, and thought this was a really surprising jumping off point from "The Children Star". I guess it figures that she's a micro-biologist in her day job.

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May 01, 2012 Terry rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: science-fiction-fantasy

Chrysoberyl is an artist on Valedon who decides to become a carrier for a population of the micro people of Prokaryon. These Eleutherians enhance her creativity and bring her into the society of carriers. Interesting political commentary.

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Feb 07, 2013 Sally rated it 5 of 5 stars

I read this book last month and I already want to read it again. It is exciting, thought-provoking and like nothing else I have read. I would highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in science fiction or bioethics.

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Sep 22, 2009 Heather rated it 5 of 5 stars

One of the best Scifi writers of all time. Her novels are thought-provoking and painful!

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Jan 16, 2009 Manda rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: sf

i want a brain infection that worships me as god.

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Dec 17, 2008 Hillary added it

Shelves: i-own-it

This is one of my favorite books ever.

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Oct 28, 2010 Cindi Leacock rated it 5 of 5 stars

Very unusual and interesting.

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Apr 11, 2011 Bluelily3 rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: sci-fi

While I was reading this book, it was hard for me to get into, because a lot of the ideas were really foreign. But by the time I was done, I really started to like it. I checked it out at the library, and every once in awhile, I remember something from it and I want to read it again. The idea of having those little civilizations in your head is very creative.

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Feb 27, 2007 Joni rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: highlights-for-everyone

I love this book. I love the idea behind it, I love the world it's set in, I love the main character. It's set in a future world, a fantasy/sci-fi, written by a biologist. So intresting!! A good book even if you aren't a sci-fi/fantasy person

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May 19, 2013 Christian rated it 4 of 5 stars

May 15, 2013 Matt rated it 4 of 5 stars

May 15, 2013 Michael Corniel marked it as to-read · review of another edition

May 15, 2013 Lisa Martincik is currently reading it

Shelves: sff

May 14, 2013 I. K. Lore marked it as to-read

May 10, 2013 Kristen Walker rated it 5 of 5 stars

May 09, 2013 Wealhtheow marked it as to-read

May 20, 2013 Gremlin rated it 2 of 5 stars

May 07, 2013 Joshua added it

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About Joan Slonczewski

Joan Lyn Slonczewski is an American microbiologist at Kenyon College and a science fiction writer who explores biology and space travel. Her books have twice earned the John W. Campbell award for best science fiction novel: The Highest Frontier (2012) and A Door into Ocean (1987). With John W. Foster she coauthors the textbook, Microbiology: An Evolving Science (W. W. Norton).

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Brain Plague (Elysium Cycle)

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