Slant: A Novel - Softcover

Bear, Greg

3.63

2,374 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0812524829 ISBN 13: 9780812524826

Publisher: Tor Science Fiction, 1998

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In the sixth decade of the 21st century, the world has been transformed. Nanotechnology has been perfected, giving humans the ability to change their environment and themselves on the cellular level. And the study of the mind has brought about a revolution in both human psychotherapy and artificial intelligence.

It's a sane and perfect world. Almost.

A man called Jack Giffey is planning to break into the Omphalos, the most secure building in all of separatist Green Idaho. Rumor says that the Omphalos houses the not-quite-dead, the very wealthy deceased who are still alive, their brains connected directly into Thinkers, Artificial Intelligences that provide a virtual reality. Data is the great treasure of the new millennium, and Giffey plans to tap into the Omphalos datastream, to steal the knowledge gathered by the inhabitants of the Omphalos.
In the offices of Mind Design, Inc., the most advanced Artificial Intelligence in the world has had a unique experience. She has received a request for contact from a new AI, one she does not know and did not help to design. Jill has never met a stranger of her own kind before; is it an alien Thinker, or the offspring of some vast conspiracy?

Slant is set in Bear's Queen of Angels universe, and is one of the great science fiction novels of the 1990s.

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Review:

This is the sequel to Greg Bear's popular Queen of Angels, and, like most of this award-winning author's works, it's a stunner. Bear is right at home with the computer and nano technologies that underlie his near-future society. With most of the world's ills having been cured by nanotech, humanity is free to turn its explorations inward, to the mind. Advanced therapies have all but eliminated emotional imbalance, and things have never been better. But when public defender Mary Cho begins investigating a double-murder, she uncovers the truth: all of the high tech is failing, and things will never be worse.

About the Author:

Greg Bear sold his first short story, at the age of fifteen, to Robert Lowndes's Famous Science Fiction. Since then, he has written some twenty novels, including Eon, Slant, and Moving Mars. A winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards, Bear is married to Astrid Anderson, and they, and their two children, live near Seattle, Washington.

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