Greg Bear's forays into various thriller subgenres are a mixed bag which I find almost always worthwhile for his occasional bursts of intense and deeply weird imagery. His earlier future-FBI doohickey [b:Quantico|214372|Quantico|Greg Bear|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172766774s/214372.jpg|1430847] was more conventional, but Mariposa, despite being sort of a disjointed mess full of the kind of police/spy gadgetry digressions that don't do much for me, is really interesting because of three things.

First, the premise that gets the plot going is a variation on the idea of superintelligence that didn't remind me of any other treatment of that subject in SF: basically, becoming a mental superman means reliving the free-associative learning of a two-year-old, being unable to distinguish between rationality and fun, and being liable to either commit horrible crimes or accidentally break your own limbs while testing the limits of what you can do. I found it oddly moving, in keeping with my feeling that Bear's best writing has always been about extreme, ineffable emotional states.

Second, I don't think I've seen any other example of a series of books crossing multiple science-fiction time scales— that is, periods of futureness that are different enough to be subgenres— within the span of a regular human life. There are characters who start out in a near-future thriller in Quantico, and by the end of Mariposa, they're within walking distance of the much shinier and scarier future of Bear's [b:Queen of Angels|410766|Queen of Angels |Greg Bear|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1298532448s/410766.jpg|4272], and it reminds you that things really can move that far in a generation. The wonderfully-named villain Colonel Sir John Yardley, who by the time of Queen of Angels has become a kind of cross between Castro and Mr. Kurtz, just barely shows up near the end of Quantico as a nondescript upstart, and it feels like the way those things happen: you first heard about Yardley on the news as a kid, now you can't remember a time without him.

Third, police/military-related techno-thrillers tend to have a politically conservative feel, and this (like Quantico) was no exception. That's not how Bear usually seems to me, which makes me wonder whether a) the near-future setting predisposes me to see certain events as comments on current politics, or b) this is how Bear really feels about the world, but he only expresses it directly when he's writing about the near future. Either way, the book's apparent point of view isn't exactly right-wing in any of the familiar styles popular in current American politics, or in political SF by people like Niven and Pournelle; it's a very odd mix of anti-corporate and authoritarian, internationalist and ethnocentric— which, maybe not coincidentally, is a lot like the idiosyncratic crankiness of late-period Poul Anderson (who was literally Bear's father-in-law). I would find this more off-putting if Bear weren't so good at conveying the feeling his characters have that the world is becoming unrecognizable to them, something we can all more or less agree on. ( )

Think it's just me but I had to put the book down after a couple of chapters, wait a few days and try again. Too many characters talking over one another, or at least that's how it felt to me. Once I was able to realize whom was who the story made much more sense and became engaging. Scary goings on and a bit of sci-fi flavor..good read. Would like to know more about Rose and Nate; specifically how they handle the changes the treatment gave them. ( )

Read Quantico again, to be in the mood for this, but this took one major turn in style, and was somehow not well edited, more like 2.5 points.
There are no spelling errors, and some grammar errors or missing words may have been deliberately (slang/speech from characters), not too distracting, but also left me feeling like a bad scan or shoddy editing (or no editing).
The idea was good, so 3 stars it is.
I may add to this review in the next few days.
Recommended with warning, do not expect too much, this should have been a page-turner, but for that it was too complicated.
This an SF-take on something Brad Thor [a:Brad Thor|5088|Brad Thor|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1201288917p2/5088.jpg] might write, or from the Tom Clancy-Group [a:Tom Clancy|3892|Tom Clancy|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1407672935p2/3892.jpg] (think Netwars).
A very specific US-Future which has a lot of true ideas and some good thought out political twists.
( )

The events in this book take place in the near future. Reading it, you can imagine a story like this unfolding within a couple of years from now. cutting edge scifi blended with the current reality of runaway borrowing by the entire USA. ( )

Jumps from scene to scene in an attempt to create intrigue. It doesn't work. The conversations are unrealistic. You are not given any reason to 'connect' with any of the characters. I finally quit reading on page 244. The storyline is about a computer that oversees all government debt in the world and decides on it's own if it wants to call in the loans. All of the action revolves around attempts to gain control over this computer. Nothing in the book makes any of this real to the reader. It's just boring. ( )