This book blew my brain and left my skull a cracked, smoking husk containing nothing but remnants of wows and questions. Don’t be dissuaded by my cowardly 3 star rating, fans of thoughtful, “big idea” science fiction that seeks to unravel the primordial question of “who we are” and the modern obsession of “what we are becoming” should definitely give this novel a go. My rating is based more on the admission that I think this story got away from me at some point and my not being entirely sure...

Queen of Angels has been described as Greg Bear's most ambitious work, and ambitious it certainly is. But ambition does not necessarily equal success.The book takes a murder-mystery type story - a famous and successful poet of the 21st century unexpectedly murders eight of his closest friends - and turns it into a musing on the nature of awareness and identity. The question is approached through various perspectives- that of a policewoman who has opted for physical transformation through nanotec...

I know it's a bit late in the game, but I am now a fan of Greg Bear. Ok, so I did 5-star Eon, Mariposa and Blood Music, but Queen of Angels is the first of his works that made me want to read more of his backlist.Why? Because the book is just chockful of mind-expanding ideas, presented in a pleasantly unpredictable collage. Ideas such as --- the thin line between sanity and the rest of the "abnormal" states - neurosis, psychosis, detachment, possession, psychopathy; society's attempts to control...

In my opinion, this is the finest novel ever written - by anyone. This novel is so much more than the sum of its parts, and is so beautifully constructed and written that one is left with a sense of wonder that anyone would even attempt to write it... and with a sense of awe that the ambition required to do so succeeded in every sense. The book is both so fiercely intelligent and so intellectually and emotionally challenging that the reader is left exhausted: it has a shattering effect upon the

This novel is a must for psychologists who are science fiction readers! I found it difficult to get into this book at the beginning, but knowing this author's skill to make you think, I persevered and got my reward. The country of our mind is truly an incredible reality where we create our own illusions. I perceive our 'Soul' to be the culmination of our consciousness experiences in or out of our human body, and this novel takes the reader through the psyche of a serial killer!Bear continues for...

Greg Bear is clearly trying out a different writing style for this book, but I'm not sure how it is supposed to set the tone or inform the reader how these characters think. In reality, it is extremely annoying and tiring. He fails to use punctuation, like commas, in any of the character train-of-thought. There are enough run-on-sentences in these pages to make your eyes bleed. It is exhausting to decipher it all, and the story just isn't worth all the work.

Storyline: 3/5Characters: 3/5Writing Style: 2/5World: 4/5Wow! And just in case that did not adequately convey the sentiment, WWWwwwwwwooooooowwwwww!!!!!!!! It is a treat to read something so stamped through with ambition. All the more so when that ambition is matched equally with effort and purpose. I have read other Bear works that were more passively enjoyable but nothing about them prepared me for this. This was purposeful. A sit-up-and-take-notice purposiveness where word choices matter, tim...

If there's one unifying problem in bad science fiction, it's the tendency to overload books with too many ideas. Queen of Angels is a perfect example of this mistake. After the poet Emmanuel Goldsmith murders eight of his friends with no apparent motive, the novel picks up four different threads of plot1) Mary Choy, a policewoman pursuing Goldsmith.2) Martin Burke, a therapist attempting to figure out why Goldsmith committed the murder.3) Richard Fettle, a friend of Goldsmith grappling with his

Another reviewer Stephen, "This book blew my brain and left my skull a cracked, smoking husk containing nothing but remnants of wows and questions."I totally agree. It's an interlacing cyber-fi story of 4 groups of 'people' having what in common? That's my question. My initial thought was it's a modern rendition of Crime and Punishment. This is a major theme, though it's been too long since I met Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov to do a comparison justice {uninyended pun). I do think there may be s...

So part of this future society has been 'therapied' - enhanced and perfected by nano-technology - and half hasn't. Some people get murdered and boring police-type woman has to find the person who did it. They know who did it - exciting future technology did that in the first 5 minutes - they just can't find him. Meanwhile, in space, an AI becomes aware and writes some really bad poetry. I really wanted to like this but just couldn't get into it. The 'newspeak' & setting was frustrating & the cha...

Quite surprised with this work of Greg Bear. While I never read something of his that disappointed me, this is such an excellent intelligent work that I feel lucky to have read it. The story line is rich and holds the tension all along. As it is told from many POVs, it is up to the reader to patch them into coherent unfoldment of events. Interesting thinking about Art and especially literature, but above all is the thrill of tracing the awakening of the AI characters. Definitely recommended.

review of Greg Bear's Queen of Angels by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - March 1-4, 2018 For the full review go here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/...Ok, I might as well just add Bear to my personal pantheon of great SF writers & be done w/ it. I keep hesitating to put him there b/c the writing's just a tad bit too.. college-correct. But the ideas are always amazing & he's done a great job w/ this one, this is probably one of my favorites of the 20 bks I've read by him so far. A central cha...

BEST WRITTEN GREG BEAR BOOK I'VE READ SO FAR, STILL ONLY 3 STARS

In the not too distant future humanities first interstellar probe, controlled by an artificial intelligence that is just teetering on the precipice of self-awareness, is approaching Alpha Centauri after a 15 year flight. Meanwhile back on Earth a poet suddenly, with no apparent motive, kills 8 of his followers. This act launches three separate threads; one follows the police detective investigating the killing, one follows a psychiatrist investigating the mind of the poet/killer and one follows

A good book that seems at times like it could be great, but falls just short. Bear's Queen of Angels (originally published in 1990) is set at the end of the year 2047 in a USA where the advent of nanotechnology has allowed for the development of advanced medical and neurological treatments. Most physical disease has been eliminated and even mental/neurological/psychological disorders can be treated with nanotech therapies. These therapies allow everyone to life well adjusted lives. Therapies hav...

Queen of Angels is quite simply, the most staggering science fiction project I never saw coming. I had read Eon, and Blood Music. But Queen of Angels is character driven, filled, nay, bursting with ideas from every few pages. I do not give brief summaries, well yes I do, because I can not help myself but no spoilers. This far too short novel, relative to it's gravitas deals seriously with the evolution of the human soul, as it navigates its way through an exponentially changing Universe. One one...

Excellent and at times profound book, characters felt real in a way that often similar books lack. Quick summary: Near future, society is mostly similar, but for the most part current judicial punishments have been replaced by extremely effective neurological therapy, which is also used to fix various mundane personality flaws. For the most part people are happy sane and healthy. [I do love that what would be an awful dystopoian cliche in the hands of many writers is handled in a properly nuance...

This is a really neat story. It was a triplet of stories all surrounding what it is to be human and a bit of humanity. The science in this science fiction wasn't nearly as difficult to parse as some of the more recent works I've had to auger through but it was a good set of stories. Ones I could get under the skin of. The polish in movements, scenes, ideologies all seemed well laid out.If you want to see a transform detective from future LA, a scientist that can delve into the human psyche--and

DNF. I tried, I really did--twice--but I just couldn't get through this. The run-on sentences, missing commas, plus signs thrown in for no reason I could detect, uninteresting poetry and other random bits with no apparent relationship to the main story, etc. make this difficult to wade through.I'm willing to put up with some amount of linguistic experimentation in pursuit of an interesting story, but the characters and the plot never grabbed me, and the sheer amount of grammatical rule-bending s...

There was too much going on in this book (too many seemly unrelated story lines), and I found it a struggle to get through. The ideas were interesting, but weren't explored in too much depth. I found the writing a little difficult to get through because of lack of commas and proper punctuation (no doubt done on purpose, but it still bothered me). In general the book was okay, but I would not recommend it to a friend.

Not to my tastes at all. It chucks out a huge number of concepts and character storyline but I felt never really explores them well enough.It also seems to be trying to do an experimental style but it often just comes off as pretnetious rather than innovative.Finally it tries to do some exploration of race which may have been interesting at the time but now feels dated.I do give it some props for trying but a failed experiment for me.

Nope. Can't do it. Sort of feels like it was written in another language, poorly translated into English, and then printed as is. I don't enjoy reading books that give me a headache.I loved Eon, Eternity, and a few of his others, but this series isn't happening for me (I also accidentally read Slant before this not knowing it was the 4th in this set).

Greg Bear was one of my first great introductions to sci fi (Forge of God/Anvil of Stars were phenomenal. This book is garbage. Unreadable. I made it 50 pages in and just couldn’t read it anymore. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to read a book in a nonexistent English dialect with no commas. The story seemed interesting but I just can’t read this anymore

I could not get into this book. The characters did not draw me in and hold me. The language was sometimes confusing and you get these + signs that I never quite got. I read about 100 pages of this and put it down. It may finish stronger but to me it was not worth the time to get there.

I just could not get into this book at all. The writing style was frustratingly archaic and the characters so far removed from this reality as to not excite much interest. I finally gave up after 10 chapters.

Clearly Bear had a idea he wanted to share, about identity and sentience. To do this he wove together 4 or 5 different stories, but sadly it meant that none of the stories got enough time for me to care about them or the characters.

I've quit books half-read before, usually because they were bad. This isn't really a bad book, I just don't care. Neither the plot nor any of the characters are the least bit engaging. I'm not even bored by it, I... just don't care.

DNF. Interesting premise for the story; writing and dialogue was too weird for me to abide. I want to spend my available reading time with a book that is more enjoyable and less of a challenge than Bear's "Queen of Angels".

No star rating, as it'd be trifle unfair after ten pages, but look mate, there's a synopsis on the back cover and a whacking great spaceship on the front - I know it's sci-fi. You don't have to fall over yourself proving how space-y it is in the first chapter. Largely gibberish.

Confusing mess from Bear. A lot of the same concepts are better utilized in his other work.