Queen of Angels - Greg Bear

I am a shamefully lazy blogger...it's coming up on a year since my last post. I have been extremely busy, but hey, who isn't?

But just because I've not been online doesn't mean that I haven't been reading. I've been reading quite a bit, just haven't been able to get the time and get my thoughts down.

I'll try and catch up on a lot of the things that I've read in the last few months, but for now just a quick note on a book that impressed me so much that I just finished it, put it down and just powered up to rave about. Greg Bear's 1988 novel, "Queen of Angels." Superb! A millenarian tale, a bit late for one of those you might think as we steam towards the end of the first decade of the Twentieth Century. However in this case it's set in 2048, the binary millennium. Without wanting to blow the plot, in essence it's four subplots, all triggered by the brutal slaughter of a number of young people by a one of the worlds most famous and respected poets. Bear's imagining of a world sixty years from the time of writing is fascinating. Communications from an experimental AI piloting man's first interstellar probe, having arrived in Alpha Centauri eight years previously finally relativistically return home to an anxious and eager audience. Society after a series of ecological and political catastrophes has achieved and almost perfect equilibrium. Cultured, wealthy and psychologically therapied individuals live in the Combs, vast skyscraping habitats. In the Shade beneath, catching scheduled, reflected light, the less wealthy struggle to hold on to untherapied freedom, spurning the security of Comb existence to retain what they believe is their humanity. Crime has been virtually eliminated as criminality has been reclassified a disorder which can be cured. Nanobots surgically remove offending sections of the brain and psyche of those who are lucky enough to be caught by the police. The unlucky are taken by a shady, pervasive vigilante underground, The Selectors. Their use of outlawed Hellcrowns can immerse the offender in a nightmare so mind-burningly brutal, that those who are not lobotomised by the process, can never even consider committing a crime again.

An LA Public Defender, Mary Choy, genetically and surgically altered, a Transform, must find the murderer and bring him in to be therapied, before the selectors find him and administer swift justice of their own.

Sounds like a crime novel? Believe me it isn't.