Author: Greg Bear
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
Rating: WARTY!
Today is the 17th, so it's time for a novel which begins with 'Q'!
Normally I write my reviews as I read the book, but in this case I had finished it long before I could be bothered to put pen to paper - or more accurately, finger to keyboard! By the time I came to write it, I had pretty much forgotten the entire book, which is a review in and of itself. Obviously it didn't leave very much of an impression on me! I had to go back and read the blurb just to get my thoughts on track.
I'm a fan of Greg Bear's writing in some instances, but not a fan of everything he's written. I loved the "Way" quadrilogy (although I have yet to read the fourth book in that series), and I liked the Forge of God dilogy (the second volume better than the first), but I could not get into the loosely bound hexalogy which begins with Quantico. Indeed, it's so loosely bound that I was able to read several books out of order before I even knew it was a series!
I think the whole hexalogy goes: Quantico - Mariposa - Queen of Mars - Slant - Heads - Moving Mars but don't quote me on that. I read Mariposa too, but all I remember of that - essentially - is that I didn't like it much. It borrowed too heavily from Eric Drexler's Engines of Creation. Queen of Mars I never finished and it's been sitting around on my shelf while I try to decide if I want to start over with it! Moving Mars I read and liked, but Head and Slant I have not read. The latter does intrigue me, however.
This particular novel was a bit too much like the preachy later works of Michael Crichton - it felt too much like a lecture, or a Tom Clancy military training manual to enjoy it as a novel. The high-tech was interesting, but that's not a story. The story pursues new FBI special agents Fouad Al-Husam, William Griffin, and Jane Rowland, who team up with bio-terror expert Rebecca Rose, and find that they're in a lot deeper than they expected to be when they begin chasing what appear to be your run-of-the-mill terrorists. It takes place in the second decade of this century, which is another reason why it seemed so unrealistic, for me. It actually has nothing to do with the FBI training facility at Quantico!
The novel pretty much takes the most disturbing terror attacks of recent years and augments and modifies them to make a series of almost non-stop attacks in the very near future - a building wrecked in DC, a plague attack, and so on - but the diversity of the attacks and the number of people, and plot-lines drafted in to swell this story makes it a farce more than an entertaining story of terror. In the end, it makes it a confused mess, which is why my recollection of it isn't exactly crisp, I'm guessing.
So in short, I can't recommend a novel which is such a mess and makes so little impression - in other words, which does exactly the opposite of what the author intended!
