I’m a huge fan of Greg Bear. While not always the most elegant wordsmith, he knows how to write good, hard, compelling science fiction.

I’ve recently finished Darwin’s Radio, an enjoyable present-day drama that chronicles the outbreak of a genetic retrovirus across mankind, now manifest after centuries hidden away in our DNA. It follows a group of progressive scientists and journalists in a struggle against the conservatism, fear and towering bureaucracy of modern-day political culture and into the dawn of a new period of speciation for Homo sapien.

If this sounds like a large undertaking, that’s because it is; Bear, however, remains solidly grounded in his storytelling, taking what would in other hands be a cripplingly speculative scientific concept and turning it into a thoroughly enjoyable character-driven narrative. It joins Eon, Eternity, Legacy, and Blood Music as a Bear novel I would recommend with little hesitation.

Next, having just enjoyed a novel in the oh-god-there’s-been-an-outbreak-of-disease genre, I figured I’d try another one; this time, fittingly, Robin Cook’s Outbreak. What a mistake.

The book is crap. The story, centered around an Ebola flare-up, is formulaic and predictable, the characters downright silly. The writing seems to exist for its own sake; it’s simplistic, one-dimensional prose peppered with tired tricks and bestseller-list clichés. In Darwin’s Radio, Bear is refreshingly unafraid to take risks with his writing. Admittedly, they may not always come off in perfect stride (indeed, the romance passages in particular can be comical), but at least I haven’t read them all before.

Outbreak’s storyline is ridiculous, feeling much like a reality television show; artificial problems are edited in for cheap suspense, none of which make up for the entirely tedious story arc. If there’s anything that can be salvaged from having almost finished the book, it’s a reminder to avoid any author on the New York Times' Nonfiction List like the plague (pun emphatically intended).

tl;dr: Read Greg Bear, avoid Robin Cook.

To end on a positive note, I’d like to remind everyone about The Andromeda Strain, another example of an outbreak novel done right (and yes, I’m aware Crichton is a New York Times Bestseller. I’m also convinced that sometime in the early nineties, Mr. Crichton was abducted by aliens, and any novels published under his name since were produced by a weak impersonator who has clearly grown tired of writing).