Queen of Angels was published by Warner Books in 1990, and it is Bear’s most structurally ambitious novel — a four-strand narrative set in a near-future Los Angeles that has been transformed by nanotechnology, genetic engineering, and the “therapy” of criminal minds.
The four narratives interweave: a police detective investigates the mass murder committed by a celebrated poet; a team of “psychologists” enters the killer’s mind (literally, using nanotech) to discover his motivations; an artificial intelligence named AXIS, traveling to Alpha Centauri aboard an unmanned probe, approaches consciousness; and the political and social tensions of 2047 LA — a city divided between the “therapied” (citizens who have had their psychological disorders corrected through nanotechnology) and the “untherapied” (those who refuse or cannot afford the treatment) — build toward crisis.
The novel’s central question is what consciousness is and where it comes from. The AI AXIS achieves awareness gradually, in passages of extraordinary beauty that describe the emergence of self-reflection from complexity. The killer’s mind, explored from the inside, reveals landscapes of metaphor and memory that blur the line between psychology and geography. The therapied society raises the question of whether a “corrected” mind is still authentically human.
Collecting Queen of Angels
First edition (Warner Books, New York, 1990): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $10–$30
- Paperback editions: $5–$10