Blood Music
A biologist injects himself with intelligent lymphocytes. The cells evolve into a civilization, then into something beyond civilization. Bear's 1985 hard-SF novel about biological transcendence anticipated the Singularity before the term existed. It remains viscerally terrifying.
The human cast is flat, “vessels for the science and story rather than dynamic individuals.” The prose is cold and clinical, “written like a scientific report” in one reader’s account, and a professional review independently lands on “the detached precision of a scientific report,” keeping people at a distance from ideas they otherwise find compelling. The scale jump is exactly where readers lose the thread; “i have no idea what happened,” one admits. The back half meanders once the premise stops being confined to one body. And the ending cuts off rather than resolves.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
