Defenestrating Thoughts from the Bivouac

Greg Bear came by the Google Kirkland office to talk about his new (at the time) book Quantico and I snagged a free copy. By the way, this was in May of last year; I told you I was behind on posting about books I read. :-)

I’ve never read anything by Greg Bear before and though lots of people rave about his other books, I found this one disappointing.

Basically this book is a present day thriller about the War on Terror, Government agencies, and some new technology. The central theme seems to be something along the lines of:

Bio-terrorism is a real threat, but the government created unnecessary and redundant bureaucracy that ends up slowing things down.

Nothing terribly original there. The book is primarily plot driven and there’s no real literary value (irony, symbolism, characters, etc); after all it’s a thriller.

Unfortunately, the plot in this book moves slowly and it’s a little disjointed. We hop from character to character and since they are under-developed, you start getting them mixed up.

And then at the end, we get a completely out of left field event that is supposed to wrap up the plot, but it’s so weird, it’s unbelievable.

While researching this, I learned a new phrase that describes this, deus ex machina, which means an “inferior plot device that expeditiously solves the conflict of a narrative”.

In summary, Quantico is a sub-par mass-market thriller. I won’t read it again; I tried selling my copy, but copies are going for a couple of bucks online. Apparently, I’m not the only one that didn’t like the book. :-)