Rating: 
Summary: Not All It Could Have Been.
Review: "Slant" is Greg Bear's "Stand on Zanzibar". It is a future of abundance provided by nanotechnology. Nobody starves, and nobody is sick. However, meaningful work is scarce. A large portion of the population is addicted to a full sensory entertainment called "Yox" and is on social welfare. A large segment of the productive population are "therapied". The therapied are citizens who have been treated with nanites to correct sociopathic behavior, mental or physical ailments. The stresses of this perfect world take a heavy toll on the population. Gradually, then very quickly "therapied" citizens are either lapsing or developing strange new mental disturbances. The lives of four people and an AI wend there way toward the solution of this mysterious breakdown. This story recycles some of Bear's "Queen of Angles" characters. You don't have to have read "Queen" to enjoy "Slant". Bear's prose is solid. He's a past master of a storyteller. Any futurist would enjoy this not-quiet-cyberpunk story. I especially liked his cullings from the net at the beginning of most chapters. What I did not like about the story was the way Bear sliced and diced the point of view. In the beginning there are fully five main characters (Jill, an AI; Gif an old cracker; Mary, a cop, Alice, a porn queen; and Jonathan, a businessman). This was way too many. These multiple points of view made the plot difficult to follow. The development of the better characters suffered by that of the lessor. The story could have been more concise or even richer, if the reader wasn't being violently reset every six or eight pages. Bear creates a believable, although not very nice future. I would read this book just for the author's vision of a world whose greatest struggle is better entertainment. On the downside, I did find the story hard to follow. "Slant" is good, but not as good as it should have been.
Rating:
Summary: Bodymod future for all
Review: A beautiful universe in the style of Paul Di Filipo's Ribofunk. Any bodymodification is possible, beauty is so common you have to resort to wings, tails, and custom psyches to be different. Anything you want is yours, just jack your brain into the multiverse and Experience. If you really want physical stuff a bucket of nano will manufacture it all. (Psycho)analysis is what keeps everyone going in a world moving at a blinding ever faster pace. The social split between the rich high-untherapied, their purity of thought, free of any biomeddling, what purity of blue blood was once. Into midst of this throw in a cabal of rich luddites who've read Noah's ark story a little too often. Story? We sci-fi fans don't need no stinking story! No, seriously speaking the story is solid, interesting though no high literature. Despite all the dizzying task switching between threads I found myself skipping ahead to keep linear flow, only a couple of times. My major beef is that the author seemed to be in some major marital-trauma as he was writing this. Every relationship in this book is utterly disfunctional, varying only between grotesque, pathetic and criminal. Ok, relationships suck, you have marital problems but must you throw snide remarks into every other page? "an attractive woman - one with any features in her favour - must speck out a sexual situation with some sort of internal calculator, how she has to weigh and balance and draw deep conclusions. He has met very few women without this trait, this set of skills. It's sort of an insult, and it's one of the things that sets women apart from men in his book. Men are more like puppies - sloppy and sometimes crule puppies, but right up front with their needs." Cute, amusing, somewhat true, but really an observation at the level of `how beer is better than women,' and there are entierly too many of these in the book. Anais Nin this is not.
Rating:
Summary: Dissects "virtual" love and the "information age"
Review: Bear is one of the best at taking cultural trends & obsessions and showing their origins and their logical culminations. He carries our present information-based economy forward to a time when it has reached absurd (but believable) heights. He accurately portrays what may be the future of sex and intimacy when people become more interested in "virtual" thrills than in true intimate relationships. It is much easier to get satisfaction through surrogates and onanism than it is to expose one's self to risk of rejection and the day-to-day problems of genuine relationships. I think this book hits the mark from a sociological/analytical standpoint. Plus - the hard science is described in an interesting, understandable way. The Jack Giffey plotline was not fully fleshed out - and it takes too long to get the reader to empathize with Jonathan's family. But, by and large, it was a satisfying, eye-opening read. My favorite of Bear's books are "Forge of God" and "Anvil of Stars." This one comes close, but can't totally capture the reader because none of the characters has the depth or history that Marty did in "Anvil." Greg Bear: If you read this... Keep it up - and keep the sex in your books. It makes them more real - and more human in the truest sense.
Rating:
Summary: Dissects "virtual" love and the "information age"
Review: Bear is one of the best at taking cultural trends & obsessions and showing their origins and their logical culminations. He carries our present information-based economy forward to a time when it has reached absurd (but believable) heights. He accurately portrays what may be the future of sex and intimacy when people become more interested in "virtual" thrills than in true intimate relationships. It is much easier to get satisfaction through surrogates and onanism than it is to expose one's self to risk of rejection and the day-to-day problems of genuine relationships. I think this book hits the mark from a sociological/analytical standpoint. Plus - the hard science is described in an interesting, understandable way. The Jack Giffey plotline was not fully fleshed out - and it takes too long to get the reader to empathize with Jonathan's family. But, by and large, it was a satisfying, eye-opening read. My favorite of Bear's books are "Forge of God" and "Anvil of Stars." This one comes close, but can't totally capture the reader because none of the characters has the depth or history that Marty did in "Anvil." Greg Bear: If you read this... Keep it up - and keep the sex in your books. It makes them more real - and more human in the truest sense.
Rating: 
Summary: If you read Blood Music, this book will suck.
Review: Bear's Blood Music was an awesome story, so I had some pretty high expectations for this novel. What a disappointment. The only thing that was halfway interesting were the little net-media blurbs interspersed throughout the book. There is very little to do with nanotech, as the back of the book somewhat misleads you to believe.
Rating:
Summary: A futurist pulls out all the stops.
Review: Bear's book provides us with a future most hard-sci-fi readers believe is coming. Much of the book centers around the Internet, illustrating how moral and ethical values will be changed when anyone can experience any virtual life style with complete realism and almost complete anonymity. Intricate body and mind modifications, from sex changes to psyche are almost as easy as getting a tattoo. This novelist has been one of my favorites hard-sci-fi writers now for 15 years, and he didn't disappoint. As with any realistic futurist, Bear takes us to a place some will relish and others will despise. It's a tough and disturbing read, but worth it in the end.
Rating: 
Summary: Two Thumbs Up, A Ten out of Ten, etc., etc., etc.
Review: Before reading Slant, I had just finished reading another of Greg Bear's great works, Moving Mars. Slant, one could say, is on the same "timeline" as Moving Mars and Queen of Angels (although I have not read this, I do plan on it). Slant, although it can also be a great stand alone book, helps to explain many of the technologies and much of the society of Moving Mars. Slant is an excellent book that looks into the future of Earth and its culture. With the way things are going now we could actually have something similar to the dataflow culture described in Slant. At first there are many different plot lines but after the first 100 to 150 pages or so I could already see the overlapping. In the end, all the plot lines come together nicely, answering just about all the questions raised during the main body of the work. If you like hard Sci-Fi and would like to take a look into a somewhat disturbing but almost feasable future, read Slant. It's well worth it.
Rating:
Summary: /
Review: Excellent piece of work here. Easy to follow, a much improved writing style from "Queen of Angels", but should definately be read after QOA, if only to prepare the reader for the world according to Greg. I've noticed that Greg uses sub-themes in his books which seem to be more thought provoking than the actual main storyline, sexuality in Slant, and self-awareness in QOA. All very nicely done, with short extracts from imaginary books of the future. Makes me actually want to read "The Kiss of X, Alive Contains a Lie". The storyline with "Jill' the thinker is superb and Roddy's menacing superiority is frightening. The manner in which Greg deals with sexuality appears to be as thoroughly researched as the sci-fi stuff, quite excellent and refreshing. Only thing I didn't like about this book was the rather limp ending. Hence: 4/5. I've you read Slant and QOA, then I recommend Moving Mars next. Decent.
Rating:
Summary: /
Review: Excellent piece of work here. Easy to follow, a much improved writing style from "Queen of Angels", but should definately be read after QOA, if only to prepare the reader for the world according to Greg. I've noticed that Greg uses sub-themes in his books which seem to be more thought provoking than the actual main storyline, sexuality in Slant, and self-awareness in QOA. All very nicely done, with short extracts from imaginary books of the future. Makes me actually want to read "The Kiss of X, Alive Contains a Lie". The storyline with "Jill' the thinker is superb and Roddy's menacing superiority is frightening. The manner in which Greg deals with sexuality appears to be as thoroughly researched as the sci-fi stuff, quite excellent and refreshing. Only thing I didn't like about this book was the rather limp ending. Hence: 4/5. I've you read Slant and QOA, then I recommend Moving Mars next. Decent.
Rating: 
Summary: This book had great potential...
Review: First off, this is the first book I've ever read by Greg Bear. I didn't know what to expect, and I was disappointed. I don't think that this novel was completely and fully realized, as it easily could have. Slant begins with a 70 page assortment of complex and interesting characters that have absolutely nothing in common. I found this portiong of the book fascinating; all of the characters were deep and interesting. I was excited to see how they would be intertwined. This is where the disappointment came in; with the plot development. Basically, this group of people decide to storm Omphalos, a meat locker of cryogenically frozen humans. It is more complec, but that's the gist of it. The concepts here are wonderful, but Greg Bear didn't pull them together and I found the ending of the book to be very lacking and not very well-written. Slant is a slow-moving novel with good characters and a fascinating future. I think that the writing was mediocre (in many parts) as was the plot. I've heard that this isn't the greatest Bear novel...I'll give him another chance, but I don't recommend this book. -Taylor
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