Slant: A Novel

This is an expertly imagined and entirely plausible tale about the impending dangers of nanotechnology and artificial intelligence. Years ago I read Ray Kurzweil's "The Singularity is Near" and have been looking for a sci-fi novel that fleshes out the ideas Kurzweil laid out. "Slant" does an excellent job--and it was written 8 years before Singularity! (Full disclosure here: There is no mention of Singularity or the incomprehensible computing power of self-improving computers in Slant--just super powerful computers.)Yes there's sex. Lots of it. This turns a lot of people off. But there are a few things to consider. First, the sex is not gratuitous. It's not porn even though one of the main characters is a porn star and there is a porn scene in chapter 2. How can this be? Well, it's sex but I can't quite call it titillating. It's real but it doesn't celebrate porn. In fact, with the emotional destitution described I'd say the sex parts of Slant are an indictment of porn. Second, Bear is honest in his approach to nanotech motivations especially towards sex. Witness the current enthusiasm towards advanced holographic media like that seen in the Sochi Olympics. Soon entire stadiums will watch judo competitors 200 ft tall grapple for dominance. Every seat will be better than front row. In your living room you will be able to watch a full sized wide receiver in 3D holographic run 60 yards for the touchdown. You'll see it from any angle you want. Now, what's the response in the comments section to these marvels? "Everybody is thinking how great the porn will be with this technology." Porn drove the early internet and it will drive early nanotech. Bear understands this and is honest about it.But how will nanotech do that? Subscribers ingest nanobots that hook into their somatosensory systems and nerves. Porn stars to the same. The porn star nanobots record and transmit the nerve impulses and subscribers pick them up. So not only will you see and hear everything but FEEL everything too. But gone and thoroughly absent are the emotional and spiritual aspects of sex. This is the future folks and Bear is totally honest without being moralistic about the emotional havoc this creates. But this novel is NOT entirely about sex.It is also about therapy. Nanobots monitor a persons neural pathways. Pathologies can be detected and more healthy pathways can be routed around the pathological ones. Everyone can be healthy. And most are. If nanotech will give us access to every single neuron in our brains why wouldn't we use that ability to improve our mental health? Well, we do. And it has disastrous results! Something goes wrong with the nanotech monitors and people start resorting back to their neurotic and psychotic tendencies. In fact, new neuroses and mental health issues are introduced. Since we're all tied into and now dependent on this nanotech for our mental health, our entire society is racing towards insanity and the brink of collapse. Technology. Ain't it great?And then there is Artificial Intelligence--AI. Jill is a super computer working for the company that gave us these nano monitors. She is hacked by a new AI--Roddy--and suffers basically a blue screen of death. And there is Omphalos--the gold and white pyramid that is a warehouse for people who want to freeze their brains and wait out the coming collapse to emerge later and build a new society. SPOILER ALERT!!! They're connected to Roddy.The characters are very real and expertly drawn:Jack Giffey: A Sam Elliot kinda guy. Older, tough, grizzled. He's on a mission throughout the entire novel to bring down Omphalos. A good guy unless you cross him. Then he can go Special Forces on you.Alice: The porn star. A tragic character. You feel for her in her despair and loneliness.Jonathan: I imagined him as Ethan Hawke. Awesome character! He adores his wife but she just can't stand him. Her therapy has gone haywire and he has to parse the technological bugs from her true feelings. You gotta really feel for the guy. Another tragic character par excellence!Marcus: Jonathan's new boss. Head of Omphalos. Utilitarian. The ends justify the means. But he doesn't come across as evil just elite and a bit arrogant. In the end, he's constitutionally pretty weak--can't walk the walk.Jill: The AI. Great Pinocchio character! She's a computer (doesn't want to become human) who wants to help her human creators and has gigantic obstacles thrown at her by Roddy. Good tech talk and descent plotting of her plight without getting tied down to technology that can become obsolete.Mary Choy: Good cop character. Strangely, she spans two or three novels but she doesn't have a whole lot of development here save for one scene in which her own nanotech goes wrong and endangers her life as well as exposing her deepest vulnerabilities. That scene is her best in the book and truly delivers.Overall the novel is a slightly noir cop/mystery/thriller book. It really satisfies the itch I've been trying to scratch with respect to finding a real novel that grapples with the impending nanotech/AI revolution. This one does it in spades and truly makes you think.

SLANT continues the story of police office Mary Choy in the same timeline as Bear's prior books MOVING MARS and QUEEN OF ANGELS. The main themes here are of dissatisfaction and disenfranchisement among the citizens of the Pacific Northwest in the Information and Nanotechnology Age of the mid 21st century. Technological marvels abound in every corner of our lives but individual happiness is still as elusive a s ever. Several plot threads wind and weave their way to a sad but fulfilling conclusion.This is one of my favorite "hard" sci-fi books. Bear never fails to deliver a compelling and richly textured story that moves along and makes you think. Highly recommended.

I am not a reviewer, writer or critic. I usually only comment when I personally find something super good, or super bad. Unfortunately, this book is in the latter category. I have read many other Greg Bear books before this...the Eon books were so good, they kept me up until four in the morning on a couple of nights Even though I knew I had to be at work the next morning, I kept reading because I was engrossed and entertained. This book had the opposite effect. I literally could not read more than three or four pages before I was nodding off. I think the most I read of this book at one time was ten pages before I was asleep, even on a Sunday afternoon. This problem was magnified by the fact the first three quarters of the book was spent bouncing around too many poorly connected threads...threads which required more than three or four pages of reading to maintain the plot. Many times I had to go back a page or two on my previous reading to catch back up so I could remember what was going on, to be able to proceed.Another major disappointment was one of the major plot lines. The book is set in an exaggerated high tech future where there are super computers that are self-aware, even with male and female personalities. Makes you think, "Super high tech, cool." But then Bear goes all 'cave man' on the reader. The boy computer figuratively knocks the girl computer over the head, and drags her back to his "cave," and tries to make her like it. Give me a break.This book doesn't read well at all. It is like some aspiring writer poorly copied Greg Bear's style, and found a way to blackmail Greg Bear into publishing it.

The story was exciting, prescient, and self-sufficien.The Kindle edition I read suffered from poor editing; I was occasionally distracted by misplaced punctuation and malformed words. It's almost as if the edition had been produced by text-recognition software from a previous text version. The errors are few, though, and the text was quite readable.

Wow -I first read this book just after the turn of the Millenium and I felt that it was so prophetic - you read about modern physics suggesting that there are parallel universes which (could) be just a hairs-breadth away from our own but we can never meet this dual universe. Each universe plays out alternate realities to our own existence. Well Greg bear's book is so plausible in that respect - in fact throw out the alternate reality - some of this stuff could happen to us in the not so distant future.I won't give this book 5* 'cos I do find the heist somewhat implausible and I found that bit tedious, and seeing what the Porn industry in the book is capable of doing does make this seem even more improbable but hey, this is a work of fiction.But it is in the little things which ring true and then you feel the shift beneath you as what you consider to be reality is pulled from under you. They do say that the porn industry is at the forefront of all of these internet-type advances - how money is transacted, etc. That the book was published in 1997 and so much of this is now coming to pass (in some form or other) is making this guy out to be some sort of visionary. The notion that practically everyone's psychological disorders are now hidden away and what happens when they all start to resurface is frightening in itself.I sure hope that all of this doesn't quite turn like this scenario.Get it and read it - full of suprises.

Still relevant, well written and exciting to read.