Nanotechnology has transformed almost every aspect of American society, and its application to psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience has resulted in new techniques for mental "therapy" that have created new forms of social stratification.

The central unifying element involves a famous writer, Emmanuel Goldsmith, who has committed a gruesome series of murders, a crime almost unheard of in the age of therapy.

The third plot line concerns Martin Burke, a pioneer in psychotherapy who uses a technique which allows him to directly enter and interact with a patient's psychology, the "Country of the Mind," through a sort of virtual reality.

Finally, the fourth plotline considers the nature of artificial intelligence, as an AI robot space probe discovers life on a planet in the Alpha Centauri system and simultaneously achieves its own independent self-awareness, as does its twin back on Earth.

Queen of Angels, set in 2047, was written just before the creation of the first website in 1991 and describes a global network based on the exchange of text (a sort of super USENET), whereas the sequel, Slant, set in 2055 and written in 1997 after the coming of the World Wide Web, describes a global network which has inexplicably changed to resemble a vast shared virtual reality.