A missed opportunity

Greg Bear's Quantico is a quick, frightening read which is actually a little hard to recommend. It is a cautionary tale of politics, laced with near future science fiction technology aspects crammed into a thriller framework. The first two elements are excellent, while the thriller element is strong, but suffers from the common pitfalls of thrillers.

As I noted earlier, the book paints a disturbing picture of the escalating technology and practice arms race between counter-terror cops and terrorists, as well as the resultant decline in civil liberties. It also has a number of fascinating ideas for future counter-terror weapon systems. For these reasons the book is well worth reading.

On the downside, it is forced to meet the needs of the thriller genre, which include missed opportunities to stop the nefarious plot, our heroes placed in danger and a conclusion with a race against time and even greater dangers (this particular conclusion featured one very cool weapon though.) Now Bear does a decent to good job with this. He successfully cloaks just what is going on for most of the novel, but his climatic action doesn't rise above the pack.

This would have been a far stronger book if it had dialed down the action and focused on how an extended domestic anti-terror campaign affects those that fight it and the society in which it is fought. As it is, thriller readers will want more thrills and those looking for social analysis will flip ahead to get past the action.