2005, Vanguard Press, 326 pages
I have read a handful of Greg Bear’s books: Hegira, The Strength of Stones, Wind from a Burning Woman, Blood Music, and Heads, and have liked them all. He is very adept at writing about the life sciences as opposed to the classic sci-fi writer who tended to be more of a hardware guy. He’s not a big social morphologist like Dick, or an atmospheric universal revelation artist like Wolfe. Where Bear explores human society is on the margins between faith and ideology and science. His early writing revealed a keen insight into Middle Eastern theology and its militant expression. In Strength of Stones the human race has consigned Christians, Jews and Muslims to a single planet where they can do battle for eternity!
In Quantico Bear follows a handful of FBI agents through the alphabet soup maze of predatory law enforcement and global counterterrorism entities operating out of Washington D.C. Having obviously scored some clutch interviews with at least two FBI agents, and gotten a tour of Quantico I think, he goes on to place that agency in the heroic role, eliciting a good sense of inter-agency friction and a balanced empathy for the agents.
The story is about a disenchanted American who dropped out of federal law enforcement after 911 and is shopping bio-terror weapons around the world in the wake of a post Saddam Middle East of no specific date, but approximating our current time.
Below is the quote from the page after the end of the novel:
“The biological weapons and processes in this novel are possible, but not in the way I have described them. I have tried to persuade of the dangers without providing salient details.”
Greg Bear predicted, in 2005, in a book seemingly written with some FBI cooperation, and certainly possessed by some of its members, a tale that predicted a resurgent pan-Islamist movement making major territorial gains in the wake of the U.S. pullout from Iraq, and acting in league with disenchanted American citizens, who would even travel to the desiccated cradle of civilization to battle the interests of their own nation.
Apparently no one at Qauntico read Quantico, based on the level of shock radiating from U.S. authorities with the rise if ISIS in 2014.
Greg Bear crafted a gripping contemporary thriller that still holds up 10 years later.
