Quantico

Quantum Logic #1

by Greg Bear

It’s the second decade of the twenty-first century, and terrorism has escalated almost beyond control. New weapons are being spawned in remote basement labs, and no one feels safe. In North America, the FBI uses cutting-edge technology to thwart domestic terrorists. The War on Terror has reached a deadly stalemate. The FBI has been dispatched to deal with a new menace. Like the Anthrax threat of 2001, a plague targeted to ethnic groups has the potential to wipe out entire populations. But the FBI itself is under political assault. There’s a good chance that agents William Griffin, Fouad Al-Husam, and Jane Rowland will be part of the last class at Quantico. As the young agents hunt a brilliant homegrown terrorist, they join forces with veteran bio-terror expert Rebecca Rose. But the plot they uncover-and the man they chase-prove far more complex than anyone expects.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Thriller, Mystery, Suspense, Crime, Ebooks

356 pages, Hardcover

First published March 5, 2012

About the author

Greg Bear was an American writer and illustrator best known for science fiction. His work covered themes of galactic conflict (Forge of God books), parallel universes (The Way series), consciousness and cultural practices (Queen of Angels), and accelerated evolution (Blood Music, Darwin’s Radio, and Darwin’s Children). His last work was the 2021 novel The Unfinished Land. Greg Bear wrote over 50 books in total.

(For a more complete biography, see Wikipedia.)

Reviews

[Kim · Rating 1 out of 5]

Initial thoughts: Really poorly written thus far. Hanging on just to see if things improve in the next 10-20 pages. I really should try to remember the Greg Bear Rule - half his stuff is amazing writing, half is just junk.

18 July 2008: I actually gave the book 50 more pages and it just kept getting more predictable and less interesting. This book reminded me a lot of Blood Music (an earlier Greg Bear book), which wasn't bad as a short story but that I really disliked as a full novel. Quantico had a lot of potential, but was too wordy, had too many competing storylines, and failed to capture my interest.

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

well It has been some times since I have read any new Greg Bear (and I will admit I have no idea why this book was already listed as read) but it brought back quite a few memories. The first is that I forgot how much I enjoyed his work - even though it does not necessarily sit well with others. I still think Blood Music is a great book although I know options are divided.

Then there is the other side of to his work. Greg Bear to me is a hard science fiction writer and as such does like to cite a lot of possible or near possible technology. Now this might be the reason for some peoples dislike of his work for me, however had worked in and along side similar technology the "what if.." questions posed are all too plausible. And that for me mixed with the human element makes for a very potent and chilling story.

Yes the action is slow to start with, with a lot of disconnected narratives running along side each other where you think what the connection is - but it is not till the later stages do you actually realise what is going on. I particularly like how more connections are exposed in the book which take a tenuous link and make it realistic and plausible.

Greg Bear is to me a great story teller and apart from his habit of occasionally over explaining the science present (which at times is neither needed or even welcome) he is able to take a story and make it both fantastic and credible at the same time.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

My first experience with Bear's non-genre fiction, Vitals, was pretty negative. Quantico was a lot better. According to Bear, Quantico (a near-future thriller) is the first part of a lead-in to his SF sequence that began with Queen of Angels - a great novel. The connections aren't obvious here, but apparently the subsequent book, Mariposa, makes the connections much more obvious.

I don't read thrillers often because I don't find them to be particularly good stories. The characters here aren't well-written but the bioterrorism story is enjoyable.

[Soo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Notes:

Decent characters, but shoddy action and plot sequences. Story fizzled to an end.

[Topher · Rating 2 out of 5]

I normally like Greg Bear. This one was just a little too depressing.

[Amy the book-bat · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars for me

[Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Since Greg Bear recently passed away, I've wanted to read or listen to one of his books. I've enjoyed a few and also enjoyed his readings in the Seattle area.

This is the first techno-thriller I've read by Bear. I didn't know he had written any. A friend recommended it to me.

Certainly, Bear has gotten close to predicting the ravages of the dreaded coronavirus nearly a decade before it escaped or was released from a Wuhan lab. In his afterward, he warns directly against what happened in Wuhan. He had an excellent crystal ball. He also predicted the loss of confidence in the FBI, as it is politicized by one party, even while others within the FBI are oblivious to the politicization.

I mostly liked the story. The bad guys are pretty bad, always a plus.

The book's biggest weakness is a couple of characters who are, in theory, very smart, walking into a trap they know is a trap just to satisfy their curiosity. Everyone on the radio says, "get out," but the two characters do not, even though robots are available, ready to go, and easily replaceable. This trap scene goes on forever and doesn't play well.

The finale is satisfying with tension and excellent twists. I think Bear must have read Simmons' "Flashback" for at least one idea here.

Very good narrator.

I was thinking, as I listened, how much damage Comey, Mueller, Page, Struck, and Weissman have done to the FBI. I used to listen to books about the FBI, thinking, without hesitation, "these are the good guys." When listening to this book I kept thinking, "Maybe one FBI agent would do this good thing, but with all these FBI characters, most are dirty...which ones?" I recently read trust in the FBI is around 25%. I've gone from being one of the very pro-law & order, pro-FBI Americans to someone who believes most FBI agents are bad people. The foul leadership of the FBI under Mueller and Comey did that. This book got me thinking about it.

RIP Greg Bear.

[Robert Day · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is strictly a holiday read – it was chosen, before flying off on holiday, for its undemanding nature and disposability. It would have been terrible to carry a book to the far end of the world, read it, find it was the best novel ever, and then have to carry it back from the far end of the world; so it was quite a relief to find that I didn’t really enjoy reading this book at all.

On the face of it, it should have been ok. I’ve read some of Greg Bear’s books and enjoyed the sci-fi elements of them. However – this is one of those crossover books that insert just a teensy tiny bit of sci-fi into a near future setting just to fool people like me into thinking that the book would be bearable. Mainly, it’s a political thriller about US agencies (hence the title – Quantico) battling against the latest forces of evil – which for this season means Middle East terrorism.

The best that I can say is that the story line just about served to distract me from the swarms of mosquitos whining around my ears. The writing is easy to digest, with the only downside being the vocabulary – there are too many unfamiliar names, places, technologies to hold in my head all at once. None of the characters are likeable – period. This was brought home as I neared the end of the book – I found that I wouldn’t have cared less if the entire cast was wiped out. In fact, the story line did not engage me at all – there was nothing and no-one to cheer for at all. The ending was a race against time to stop some bad event from happening. I found that whether it happened or not meant absolutely nothing to me – surely it should have mattered more than that!

But then again it’s probably right that I was more worried that a passing mosquito could inject me with chikungunya virus as I sat reading, than about the death of hundreds of thousands of poorly painted fictional people.

[Lance · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well, i finished...I am usually pretty objective to reading, and even with the terrible reviews from fellow good-readers, i decided to go ahead. I have read a huge library of spy, counter-terrorism, and didn't use any of those to pre-judge. Where i did like the details, and creativity of the author in creating a NEW type of threat, the drama, tension, and panic dampened to a soggy paper towel of a story. Introduction of characters late in the book, and lack of "fear" of the antagonist had me nearly mark 2 stars...However, the premise was fine, and there were spatterings, more like driblets of excitement would allow me to recommend this to some readers. If nothing else, it will help you appreciate GREAT suspense authors, and really push you to get into Vince Flynn and Daniel Silva. As a stand alone book, was fair.

[Gena Kukartsev · Rating 2 out of 5]

Confusing book - kinda hard to follow the story without paying a lot of attention but at the same time not interesting enough to pay a lot of attention. As one commenter put it, Greg Bear has interesting ideas and writes boring books about them. Spot on.

The ideas about biological weapons are cool and sound appropriately plausible and scary. I kinda liked one character - Rebecca Rose but perhaps because of a superficial reason - all her tough/sexy image.

The book is mostly a thriller in form, about multiple special government agencies. The SF element is barely there - around the weaponization of biological agents.

[Malin · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is what I'd call SF targeted towards people not comfortable with SF; near-future fiction placed in some undefinite future where the US has a female president and law enforcement and the military have a number of neat hi-tech gadgets to help in their work (individual-locked guns, networked vital signs monitoring vests, goggles with text displays, RFIDs and cop overrides on all civilian vehicles... ). Unfortunately the introduction of all this stuff is quite infodumpy, not especially streamlined, which makes for a somewhat jarring read. And the high-tech stuff is almost never crucial to the story; it is more of a SF-nal gloss on top. It seems Bear's goal with this book is to make people sit up and take notice about the dangers of bioterrorism, which is a laudable thing to do, but since the tech for the terrorism parts in the book already exists, moving the story into the future detracts from the sense of urgency (I am guessing) he wants to inspire.

That said, the thriller part of the story is not that bad, even if the plot has several branches that could have been pruned or trimmed completely, and I liked several of the characters.

[Jackie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Newly minted FBI agents from training facility Quantico, William Griffin, Fouad Al-Husain, and Jane Rowland are almost instantly involved in the hunt for a terrorist using biological warfare. An anthrax-like substance has been found that doesn’t necessarily kill, but robs people of their memories. They seem to be in the throws of dementia.

As the hunt takes them all over the world...Turkey, Iran, Israel, they are unaware, at first, that it is one of their own, an American terrorist who has some grievances to settle, that is ultimately behind the attack.

Quantico will scare you out of your mind, hoping that something like this will never happen. Yet it is full of scientific passages that are confusing to a non-scientific person. And, the ending is unfathomably disappointing and wraps up much too quickly. Not really a fan of this story.

[Nicholas Whyte · Rating 2 out of 5]

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2673312.html

This is quite a long way down the list of well-known works by Greg Bear, fifteenth on LibraryThing and twentieth on Goodreads. Published in 2006, set around now, it features the FBI trying to get to grips with a domestic terrorism conspiracy that plans to carry out biological warfare attacks against both American targets and Mecca, to take revenge on Islam; the FBI agents use all kinds of technical stuff to try and prevent them. It's competently enough written from the technical side, and the characters of some of the FBI agents were interesting, but the plot as such barely hangs together.

[Juan Arellano · Rating 3 out of 5]

A pesar de q Bear es más conocido como autor de género (CF) esta novela no salió en una colección de CF. De hecho está ambientada en un futuro muy cercano, y es más un thriller q otra cosa. Es un poco previsible, y muy "estadounidense", aunque ya puestos en lo de thriller hubiera preferido más acción. Es decir, te pinta un peligro terrible, y luego no pasa casi nada de lo previsto, todo para que se luzcan los buenos gringos. Lo más bajo que he leido de Bear... pero no por eso se deja de leer de un tirón.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was FANTASTIC. What if Homeland Security was 1/2 of our military, what if we never left Iraq, written by a master of science fiction. Solid.

[Mark · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this book on vacation. It's a mindless read, in that you don't have to think a whole bunch. I was not overly impressed with the writing or the plot.

[Sarah · Rating 1 out of 5]

TW: Racism, Transphobia, Homophobia, Eating Disorder

I got this book as part of a Humble Bundle, and I'm really glad I only ended up with an epub, because any paper this book would be printed on would be wasted.

I'm incredibly confused about who this book's intended audience is. I'll start this review with some inane examples and then get into the deeper and more disturbing problems I found while reading. The author had no consistency when explaining various pop culture references in the book. For instance, a character quotes Dune's litany against fear, citing it as from a book the character read as a teen. Later in the book, another character quotes Monty Python and the author states this is a Monty Python reference. At another point in the book, the author explains that "J-Lo" stand for Jennifer Lopez. The author refers to "The Turner Diaries" with no explanation of what those are. I don't know a single person who doesn't know who J-Lo is, who doesn't know what Dune is, who does know what Monty Python is, and who does know what the Turner Diaries are. Who is the intended audience here?

I had a really hard time finding the plot enjoyable or interesting, partially due to my issues with the writing style. For instance, the characters were extremely thoroughly described in terms of physical characteristics, including weirdly specific racial descriptions that seemed to turn the characters in to caricatures. It seemed like the physical descriptions were a stand-in for any character depth or backstory, meaning I had no interest in the characters themselves. There were many protagonists in this book and they weren't introduced in a way that made them easy to keep straight.

This book is divided into a large number of chapters, which combined with the number of protagonists, gives the writing a very choppy and segmented feeling. Also contributing to the general disjointedness of the book, there are many FBI gadgets described in great detail in this book, and then never mentioned again. There are other gadgets that aren't described at all, and used frequently.

I really feel like the author just "winged it" with this book. There is also a great dearth of research evident, for example, the author mixes up the Challenger and Columbia disasters. The author refers to Iowa State University in Ames IA, as the "University of Ames, Iowa." The author also casually drops in the fact that a character's parents died of food poisoning and doesn't explain this at all. It's very rare to die of food poisoning in the colloquial sense and very difficult for this to happen. Unless this means someone poisoned their food, in which case I feel it needed way more explanation.

The author frequently abuses the racial conflicts that are central to this book. The author refers to indigenous people as "Indians" multiple times, which is very confusing since it took pages for it to become clear that he was referring to people from America and not people from India. Racism was frequently used in this book in a way that seemed unnecessary and didn't further the plot. There was frequent use of a wide variety of slurs.

Additionally, there is a casual mention of disordered eating that again, has nothing to do with the plot and is entirely unnecessary. There's homophobia, and I quote "if she's a lesbian, she doesn't want to be." There are transphobic slurs.

I'm honestly not sure how this book even got published. In conclusion, I don't think I'd recommend this book to my worst enemy.

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

It started off ok, as a fairly typical if well-written techno-thriller, FBI vs. terrorists. But then weird political stuff happens, it gets less and less believable, and and the story frays towards the end, which wasn't particularly satisfying.

-1 star for far too many characters, many of which were promisingly built up just to be left by the wayside.
-1 star for the ignorant and mildly offensive 1-dimensional caricatures of the various religious figures, be they Christian, Jew, or Muslim. All are portrayed as stereotypical single-minded fanatics, with one notable exception, but even there the character is reduced to cliché.
-1 star for the convoluted and far-fetched political conspiracy stuff, which mostly distracts from rather than advances the plot. It also makes the book feel terribly dated, a product of the post-9/11 Iraqi War era that completely distorts the situation (both at the time and the predicted future).
-1 star for the audiobook narrator managing to butcher pronunciations of at least 3 languages (including English!), he struggles even with common words and simple names, often to the point that it isn't even clear what he's trying to say, and the delivery is strained and almost painful. His attempt at various accents is equally atrocious, both inaccurate and inconsistent.

[Maria Rose · Rating 5 out of 5]

Despite this being written back in 2008, the implications of what could occur are very much part of our current situation in 2023, especially after dealing with the Wohan "accidental" leak of a highly contagious virus that shut down the economy worldwide. This book's bioweapon was a form of anthrax, which can be easily obtained and adapted to be changed, even today to a deadly condition form. Of course, today's generation tends not to consider past history relevant or informative. Still, anthrax has been around on earth wherever there have been life forms, including under the permafrost soil that is now due to climate warmup releasing into the atmosphere whatever was contained in the icy layers.
The story hops around from many locations based on which character has centerstage at that point of the story. It took me until Griff was laying there in the hospital setting recovering both physically and mentally) to realize what kind of bioweapon was being released and by whom. Once that was realized stopping the last planned release made more sense and brought the reader to cling to the west of their pants as they read through the tense presentation of the race by the small force racing to stop the release and sanitize the area.

[Neil Willcox · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quantico by Greg Bear is a near future bio-terror technothriller from an author perhaps better known for his hard science fiction. It is unrelated to the TV show of the same name, other than the fact the FBI academy is within the Marine Training base of Quantico.

It starts with some unlikely clues, and some FBI trainees, and some long hidden terrorists. It becomes about anthrax, and then something stranger, and an attack on the world’s major religions.

Bear’s plotting is sparse for a techno thriller, requiring you to pay attention to keep up; hints about the political situation in Washington and around the world come into sharp focus to frame the final confrontation.

Read This: For clever and interesting near future thrills.
Don’t Read This: If you prefer things clear rather than the murky, shades of grey, hidden clues and hints this book prefers.

[Tomislav · Rating 3 out of 5]

First read – 2 May 2008 - ***. This is a near future bioterror thriller. Very near future; we have a liberal woman president, a senior senator "Josephson" from Massachusetts, and the aftermath of a US withdrawal from Iraq. In the story, recent FBI academy graduates William Griffin, Fouad Al-Husam, and Jane Rowland are suddenly inserted into inter-agency intrigue and overlapping crisis of domestic and international terrorism. The concepts and events are scary in their realism. Good read, even if the ending is somewhat abrupt. Due to the use of current events, I suspect the book will not have aged well after a few years have passed.

A sequel, Mariposa, was published in 2009.

[Azriel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Knowing the author's penchant for hard Sci-fi, (despite this being my first novel by him), I was pleasently surprised by the techno-thriller aspect of the book, feeling both realistic (taking place in what is now 2-4 years ago) and frighteningly fantastic (as some of the vividly described technology has yet to enter use. One strong point that was unexpected was the dialogue, which was especially vibrant in the excellent voicing of the audiobook version I heard. The setpeices are exciting, and the ending feels like a climax of a level of Black Ops II (complete with drones and orbital mass drivers). This is hard Sci-fi for a Clancy fan.

[Scott Holstad · Rating 2 out of 5]

I know Greg Bear has some big fans and I've tried to read several of his books over the years, but try as much as I do, I don't think he's very good or impressive, and I've never been anything but bored when reading his work, such as this book. And I kind of feel bad about that because for all I know he may be a really nice guy and a great writer, but sometimes people don't click for you -- I know my work hasn't clicked for some people, so I get it -- but while I'm not personally biased against him, I still can't recommend this book or any of his others.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was good, very good, but also very worrying.
It all seems so possible, I can't imagine how different it must have seemed when it was first published.
Now, so many years on it's still science fiction, but only barely.
A thriller about FBI agents tracking two cases that are really one case, it's fairly TV Thriller Formulaic, but the thrills are still there.
I gave it four stars because there were times it was a little too real, a little too likely and was therefore a little closer to nonfiction than I like to read.

[Roy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really 3.5 stars.
I came across this book recently, not having been aware of Bear's books that are more action thriller than SF. There is an SFnal flavor, but really only to place the book somewhere in our immediate future. It could easily have been written without those features. There are some significant developments in bioterrorism that are important and beyond our current reach.
The story is a bit slow at the start but does get moving more after the first half. It is certainly chilling as a cautionary tale. I also gave at least half a star for The Patriarch, a great character.

[nathaniel · Rating 2 out of 5]

There is something about Greg Bear's writing that goes over easy and makes me think I just haven't read the right story by him yet. However, the plot and characters once again did not work well.

Bear seems to really like very near future sci-fi. Mostly the same world we live in at the time of the book's writing, but adding some tech that could plausibly be developed soon. That tends to date the books really fast. And the political/law enforcement climate of this book really dates it even faster.

[Martin L · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was written in 2005, and the fears and concerns of bioweapons, corrupt government agencies, fallen regimes, prejudices about religions and the notions that situations of incompetence and injustice are as true today as they were 20 years ago. That individuals could make a meaningful difference when confronted with these evils kept me turning the pages. The characters are engaging and believable, and the omniscient viewpoint enables empathy with the heroes and villains. This book helped me to understand the world better, making it a worthy read.

[Alayne · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novel, set in the near future, was exciting and mysterious, but I found it too long. It had too many minor characters who might be mentioned in the early chapters then not mentioned again till the end, and I was thinking, Who was that again? There were far too many acronyms which might be spelled out once but of course it didn't stick because it was unfamiliar. It didn't have a really tidy ending either, which made it a bit annoying. So 3 and a half to 4 stars only.

[Chelsea Skinner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although this book sits at 326 pages, it feels a lot shorter than that thanks to the edge-of-your-seat suspense that Bear uses to keep you captivated. With little background building, this book is a thriller right from the beginning. There are turns to keep you guessing, and just when you think you've caught on, Bear throws yet another wrench into the plans. Well-thought out characters add to the story to make this one of my favorite reads of 2019.

[Paul Gardner · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

Disappointing. There was a lot of different threads running here, any one of which could have been developed much more. I was particularly disappointed in how the main antagonists were disposed of - very much whimper-like and that, surprisingly, reduced my enjoyment in the overall story.

After a while, I had trouble following the story. I kept wondering when this or that subplot would be tied off, and they never were.