Mariposa (Quantico Series #2) Book

Mariposa is the Spanish word for butterfly and it's use as the title seems to invoke chaos theory - that a typhoon may arise from something as small as the flutter of butterfly's wings. This may be an apt metaphor for the novel Mariposa for at heart it is about the typhoon that engulfs a near-future America brewed from the geopolitical milieu of today - Middle East militant, USA borrowing, Texas self-regulating, Blackwater emergent.

In the actual novel, the butterfly Mariposa only makes a fleeting appearance. Instead, the author posits the drug Mariposa, initially intended as a miracle cure for post-traumatic stress disorder, but with long-term effects that make supermen, geniuses and psychopaths. Greg Bear tells about men and women, heroic and villainous, who must deal with technological and geopolitical changes, and attempt to steer their way to perhaps new visions and more meaningful lives. This is as dystopic as any near-term dystopia can be. Take some quaaludes ar anti-depressants before you dig in.

I enjoyed the book. It had the vibe of an early Tom Clancy thriller, with much behind the scenes political maneuvering. Bear makes this pop with very cool tech toys, and the strong resonance with his 1985 novella Blood Music. The non-nuke weapon that determines the way the book ends counts as one of the best SFnal geekery of recent vintage. The SF elements are much more to the fore here than in the predecessor Quantico, and for this I rate Mariposa 5 stars. Am looking forward to picking up its linking books Queen of Angels and Slant.