Subject: "Slant" by Greg Bear

From: [email-masked] (p-m agapow)
Date: 03 Aug 1998 11:59:58 -0400

"Slant" by Greg Bear
	A Postview, Copyright 1998 P-M Agapow

A sequel to "Queen of Angels:" it is the near future, in a world where
nanotechnology is common, body-transformation easy and treatment of the
smallest mental defect thorough and necessary.  Jack Giffey is a tomb
robber.  His target is the high-tech and impossibly secure cryogenic
facility Omphalos, located in the paranoid and independent Green Idaho.
Mary Choy is a cop fallen from grace and trying to restart her career.
The bust of a pornography racket leads her to the mysterious death of a
millionaire and a series of unexplained computer intrusions.  Martin Burke
is a psychiatrist, also fallen from grace, confronted with a widespread
failure of mental conditioning.  Jill is an AI, recently rescued from
psychosis, who has begun to receive strange messages from another AI, one
that cannot exist ...

In my mind, there are two Greg Bears, separated by the publication of
"Queen of Angels."  The first had big and breathtaking ideas that were
wounded, sometimes fatally, by terrible characterisation and ho-hum
story-telling.  Included in this category are books that are well-regarded
by many ("Blood Music," "Eon," and "The Serpent Mage") but which I frankly
wish had been better written.  Then there was "Queen of Angels" and its
successors, which look almost as if they were written by someone else.
Although their success did not always match their ambition, the stories
were more personal, character driven and busy and, as a consequence, more
intense.

"Slant" continues this trend, being a multi-viewpoint tale spiralling
around a mysterious cryogenic facility.  "Tell all the truth, but tell it
slant," warns Emily Dickinson at the book's beginning.  With eight
significant points of view, and a plot that after 150 pages is only just
beginning to get started, the narrative is very slant indeed.  Some plot
threads come together only at the very end.  In fact, there may be more
slant than necessary - one of the main characters steps offstage at the
halfway point and several make so little impact on the story you wonder
what the point is.

But there's a lot be happy with, as with all of Bear's later books.  The
world of "Queen of Angels" has become distinctly grimy, with a large
sector of the population displaced permanently from work by computers.
Citizens spend all their money on Yox, virtual reality porn.
Discrimination against anyone with less than a perfect psychological
profile runs deep.  Even the proudly retrogressive inhabitants of Green
Idaho lust after what the outside world has.  There are well-drawn
individual crises too, with Mary Choy hovering indecisively in the middle
of a body transformation and another main character Jonathan caught in a
deadend career and a deteriorating relationship with his wife.  Of course
there's the technology.  The tomb robbers go in equipped with
frighteningly powerfully military-grade nanotechnology that can dismantle
anything and rebuild it into weapons.  Housing comes stacked 500 levels
high, communication and job "touches" flock for attention on a doctor's
desktop, "metabolic carpet" devours debris and regrows damage.

Perhaps "Slant" isn't a great book, the story sometimes serving the slant
rather than the other way around.  But it is a very readable and
interesting one, another solid entry for Bear, and comes recommended.  As
an aside, enjoying "Slant" does not require that you have read the
prequel.  [***/interesting] and "Short Cuts" on the Sid and Nancy scale.

%A Greg Bear
%T Slant
%I Tor
%C New York
%D 1997
%P 505pp
%G ISBN 0-812-52482-9
%O paperback, Aus$15.95

Paul-Michael Agapow ([email-masked])
Postviews SF/F reviews & mailing-list at www.cs.latrobe.edu.au/~agapow/Postviews