Queen Of Angels

Author: Greg Bear

Crime, guilt, punishment. Does this sound like science-fiction to you or current world America? I'm starting to get scared by how realistic dystopian sci-fi that deals with futuristic concepts like artificial intelligence is becoming, and Queen of Angels is one of those novels that deals with concepts that are relevant to our every-day lives in an amazingly vivid, future world in a framework of emerging self-awareness of highly advanced super-computers. Queen of Angels builds a dystopic world around 2048 AD, where nanotechnology is an integral part of American society, used in neuroscience and psychiatry to perform new types of mental therapy, which has caused different social hierarchies, with more and more people receiving this sinister form of therapy. The therapy has a sinister side: its effect is to create bland personalities that fit into society without causing any stir in a work or social environment. If you've had this therapy, you have access to the best sorts of jobs. The other classes are the high naturals who are so naturally positive that they don't need therapy, and people who can't or won't receive therapy, known as the untherapied. The novel tells the stories of Emmanuel Goldsmith, a famous, untherapied writer and serial killer, Mary Choy, the police detective assigned to the case of the serial killer, Richard Fettle, the good friend of Emmanuel Goldsmith and another untherapied writer, Martin Burke, a psychotherapist who uses a sort of virtual reality to treat his patients minds' and who is given the opportunity to explore Goldsmith's mind, and finally, our artificially intelligent robot space probe, who discovers life on a plant in the Alpha Centauri system who achieves self-awareness, as does its twin on Earth. Queen of Angels was nominated for the Hugo, Campbell and Locus Awards in 1991 and was followed by a sequel, Slant.