The novel “Mariposa” by Greg Bear was published for the first time in 2009. It’s the sequel to “Quantico“.
The USA is near bankruptcy due to a foreign debt completely out of control. Talos Corporation is offering to save the nation but does it taking an increasing control of various government agencies. What exactly are the plans of Talos’s CEO Axel Price?
The FBI is about to be closed after it came out defeated from a political conflict around old and new law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Some FBI agents must investigate important cases, including the US president’s shooting, a psychiatric treatments that cause dangerous side effects and even Talos Corporation, but are hampered even in an open way.
In “Mariposa”, Greg Bear continues the development of near future history begun in “Quantico”. The young FBI agents protagonists of the first novel reappear in this one but the story is autonomous. Reading “Quantico” is very useful to get a bigger picture og the evolution of the characters and especially of the story.
An important factor that should be kept in mind is that “Mariposa” is part of the series called Quantum Logic and is a bridge between “Quantico” and the next novel in the internal chronology, “Queen of Angels“. In part, the story told in “Mariposa” is the development of certain technologies that are present in the other novels and some characters present in some of them are mentioned.
“Mariposa” is set in the USA close to bankruptcy at the beginning of the next decade. In that degenerate situation, Talos Corporation takes the opportunity to be much more than a military and security contractor. This private military company seems very inspired to Blackwater, a real company that a few years ago changed ownership and name after some of his operators were involved in a firefight in Baghdad in which several civilians were killed.
In “Quantico” there was a power struggle around old and new law enforcement and intelligence agencies. The result shown in “Mariposa” is that the FBI is about to get shut down and for its agents investigating even important cases can be really difficult.
If “Quantico” was mostly a thriller with elements of politics and espionage, in “Mariposa” the science fiction elements are more pronounced. That’s because Greg Bear included in the story technology that appeared in the other novels in the Quantum Logic series such as artificial intelligence and psychiatric treatments.
The main problem with “Quantico” was the considerable fragmentation of the story in short chapters and the continuous leaps from one subplot to another at the end of each chapter. When I saw that “Mariposa” was composed of 70 chapters for a length of almost 400 pages I got a bit scared but this novel is structured differently from the previous one.
I think other people criticized Greg Bear because in “Mariposa” there are still various subplots but it doesn’t leap from one subplot to another at the end of each chapter but usually there are more consecutive chapters about the same subplot. Just for this reason, this novel is better than the previous one.
Again in “Mariposa” the story is really complex, even more than “Quantico”. That’s because Greg Bear tells the story of the USA at the beginning of the next decade, with its crumbling, in a thriller and at the same time develops the science fiction elements to connect it to other stories in the Quantum Logic series.
In the end, I think “Mariposa” is only partly successful. I think Greg Bear wanted to include too many elements for a 400-page novel. The set of subplots became somewhat chaotic due to the complexity of the many intertwinements that are sometimes a little disjointed.
Despite its flaws, I think all in all “Mariposa” is a good novel but not at the levels of “Queen of Angels” and some other novels in the Quantum Logic series. I think it can still be worth reading it as a complement to this series.
