Vitals

Vitals

"Vitals" is a 2002 science fiction/techno-thriller novel written by Greg Bear.

It centres on Hal Cousins, a scientist who wishes to find a way to prevent death. He gets his funding from what he calls "angels" - rich businessmen who are keen to live a thousand years. However, on a fact-finding exploration in a small submarine, his pilot goes beserk, start spouting gibberish, and tries to kill him. He survives, but when he gets back to the ship, he finds that a member of the crew "also" went mad and started spouting gibberish, killing more scientists onboard the ship. The rest of the crew is distant from him, on the grounds of what he calls "bad mojo". He is disowned by the plutocrat in question. Hal's twin brother Rob is shot, by who is later revealed to be Ben Bridger.

The story develops from there, taking in his twin brother's widow, Lissa; Rudy Banning, a once respected professor and writer turned into an anti-semitic conspiracy theorist by a brain-altering microbe; and a scheming group of immortals who want to stay unique. They are able to do this because they have access to bacteriological research by Russian scientist Maxim Golokhov from the 1940s who was working for Beria and Stalin. Stalin possibly cameos in the story, but the issue is left vague.

There are five parts with different first-person narrators. Parts one, three, and five are narrated by Hal Cousins, and parts two and four are narrated by Benjamin Bridger.

By the end of the book, the main characters are all either dead, irrelevant, or the victim of mind altering xenophages.

Some elements of the book relate to transhumanism and life extension. Biology is a major theme in Bear's work, and bacteria and bacterial intelligence played a central role in his 1983 novel "Blood Music" as well.


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  • Vitals — Vi tals, n. pl. 1. Organs that are necessary for life; more especially, the heart, lungs, and brain. [1913 Webster] 2. Fig.: The part essential to the life or health of anything; as, the vitals of a state. The vitals of the public body. Glanvill …   The Collaborative International Dictionary of English

  • vitals — index necessary, necessity Burton s Legal Thesaurus. William C. Burton. 2006 …   Law dictionary

  • vitals — (n.) organs of the body essential to life, c.1600, from the adj. VITAL (Cf. vital) taken as a noun …   Etymology dictionary

  • vitals — /vuyt lz/, n.pl. 1. those bodily organs that are essential to life, as the brain, heart, liver, lungs, and stomach. 2. the essential parts of something: the vitals of a democracy. [1600 10; trans. of L vitalia; see VITAL] * * * …   Universalium

  • vitals — n Important information. Yo, can you give me the vitals on Jims party? 1980s …   Historical dictionary of American slang

  • vitals —    the testicles    Literally, the parts of the body essential to the continuation of life, whence usually the organs located in the trunk:     ... him so bad with the mumps and all, so that his poor vitals were swelled to pumpkin size. (Graves,… …   How not to say what you mean: A dictionary of euphemisms

  • vitals — noun plural Date: 1607 1. vital organs (as the heart, liver, lungs, and brain) 2. essential parts …   New Collegiate Dictionary

  • vitals — noun a) Those organs of the body that are essential for life. b) Those parts of a system without which it cannot function …   Wiktionary

  • vitals — SYN: viscera. * * * vital indicators of teaching and learning success * * * vi·tals vīt əlz n pl vital organs (as the heart, liver, lungs, and brain) …   Medical dictionary

  • vitals — Synonyms and related words: abdomen, anus, appendix, blind gut, bosom, bowels, brain, breast, cecum, center, center of life, colon, core, deepest recesses, duodenum, endocardium, entrails, esoteric reality, foregut, giblets, gizzard, guts, heart …   Moby Thesaurus

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