Subject: REVIEW: Queen of Angels

From: [email-masked] (Alan Wexelblat)
Date: 8 Jul 92 00:40:45 GMT

Queen of Angels by Greg Bear
		Review Copyright (c) 1992 Alan Wexelblat

I'm still a little unhappy about paying five bucks for a paperback, even if
it is 420 pages long, and even if it's by an author I know I can trust to
fill those pages with something more than the usual fluff.  "Queen of
Angels" is a cut above the standard novel, but it's not all that
spectacular.

Queen is basically a murder mystery, set in a not-too-distant future.
Certain elements of this future society are pivotal to making the murder
mystery what it is, and Bear uses the crime -- a multiple homicide -- to
throw a harsh light on his world.  Along the way, of course, he is saying
things about our own society which the future of this book resembles in many
ways.

The basic premise is that American society has developed means to treat any
possible mental ailment.  People are either perfectly mentally healthy by
accident of nature/nurture or they are cured into perfection.  Any lingering
unhappiness and dissatisfaction can be eliminated along the way.  Now,
anyone with any background in SF knows that this is a strawman set up to
fail.  And fail it does, as one of the therapied -- a world-famous poet --
commits a gruesome multiple murder.

The issue of who really committed the crime is settled early in the book.
Given the advances in surveilance and detective technologies this is not too
surprising.  What is surprising is that the murderer eludes capture, both by
Mary Choy -- the police detective on the case -- and by the Selectors --
self-appointed vigilantes of the Combs.  The Combs are the grandchildren of
today's enclosed, self-sufficient apartment complexes.  In the future, one's
status is reflected by one's position in the Combs.  Higher floors, sunnier
windows, etc.

Another thread running through the plot is that of the emergence of the
first true artificial intelligences.  One such is AXIS, the mind of
mankind's first true interstellar probe, which awakens to find itself
closing on a possibly-inhabited world light-years from home.  Only slightly
ahead of AXIS is Jill, a larger computer-based program which contains a full
simulation of AXIS within itself.  These two entities and their creator
follow their own course, their story rarely intersecting with that of the
murder/solution.

With material like this, I hoped for better from Bear.  But the book moves
too slowly for a murder mystery.  Since we readers know ahead of the
characters what the true solution is, the fact that it takes so long for the
players to solve the puzzle left me bored.  I also found that the extra
threads (including the AXIS story) while having their own interest were not
well-integrated into the story as a whole.  They seem to serve only to
provide a false tension -- false in the sense that the suspense has nothing
to do with the main plotline.

If you can pick this one up for a few bucks, or if you're a Bear fan, go for
it.  Otherwise, I'd say give this one a miss and save your five bucks.

%T Queen of Angels
%A Greg Bear
%I Warner paperback
%G ISBN 0-446-36130-5
%D 1991
%P 420 pp
%O $4.95