With his astonishing future vision, Howard V. Hendrix has emerged as one of the new masters of science fiction, drawing extraordinary praise for his debut novel Lightpaths, "a taut.space-age slice of life" (Publishers Weekly) and its "brilliant" (Locus) follow-up, Standing Wave. Now he meshes virtual reality, deep-space exploration, and human nature in a novel starkly breathtaking in its portrayal of the quest for meaning against a backdrop of scientific and spiritual chaos.Spanning the first, turbulent decades of the twenty-first century, Better Angels revolves around the mystery of an ancient, alien artifact resembling an angel's shoulder blade, and the transcendent effect it has on five people, whose lives and relationships lead to--and are forever altered by--its discovery.