Slant

by Greg Bear

published

June 4th 1998 by Orbit

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binding

Paperback, 560 pages

isbn

1857236114 (isbn13: 9781857236118)

description

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 a...more

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Punk rated it:

(review of isbn 0099350815)

06/26/07

bookshelves: sff

Read in May, 2006

SF. It's the future and therapy's on its way to becoming mandatory. Society's divided into high naturals, naturals, untherapieds, and CTRs; then there's the transforms (humans who have elected to change their physiology for aesthetic purposes) and the thinkers (artificial intelligence responsible for guiding entire companies), and the Ruggers (militia members in the Republic of Green Idaho), but now, with a little help from an unlicensed thinker and a band of domestic terrorists, those class sys...more SF. It's the future and therapy's on its way to becoming mandatory. Society's divided into high naturals, naturals, untherapieds, and CTRs; then there's the transforms (humans who have elected to change their physiology for aesthetic purposes) and the thinkers (artificial intelligence responsible for guiding entire companies), and the Ruggers (militia members in the Republic of Green Idaho), but now, with a little help from an unlicensed thinker and a band of domestic terrorists, those class systems are breaking down.

This book was very hard to read, and I don't mean emotionally, I mean on a basic technical level. There were so many new concepts and words being thrown around without explanation that it was sometimes hard just to get through a single sentence. I read a lot of SF. I'm not scared of new things, but there is a difference between skillfully presenting an alien world and simply throwing around a bunch of novums that signify an alien world.

If it was Bear's intention to use language in such a way that it no longer reflected the world I knew, he succeeded. But if he expected me to understand that language, there he fell short of the mark. Please enjoy this line of dialogue: "A swutt is someone who's rigged an untraceable face and goats it, you know, butt and run, cut touch. Thymic misfits." That's actually meant to define the slang swutt to the reader, despite the only familiar word in that sentence being "goats" which, we were told just a page earlier, is used in the same way the generation before would have said "hogs," in the sense that you're monopolizing something. Sometimes this book made me want to weep. It looked like it was English...yet, not so much. There's no real logic to what terms Bear explains. I could have lived without that baroque definition of swutt, satisfied with knowing it was derogative, which I picked up by its context, but other terms that could have really aided my comprehension of the book were left unexplored.

I kept with it, though, because I was interested in several of the characters and it was well-written, despite its choice of vocabulary, and once the book took off, I really got into the plot, which was your basic cyberpunk murder mystery heist novel. Sort of. The first half of the book is spent introducing all the characters, and there's a lot of them. Martin totally fell through the cracks because he's one of the first characters we meet, but then we don't see him again for about two hundred pages, and by then I had no idea who he was. There's the porn star, the terrorist, the thinker, the housewife, the husband, the police officer, and Martin, who apparently develops therapy strategies and technology, or did until his unfortunate connection to the mass murderer and poet, Emanuel Goldsmith (who, Amazon tells me, was apparently a character in Bear's Queen of Angels). These people don't seem to have anything in common, until slowly, starting with the murder of millionaire Terence Crest, their lives intersect, and we get a taste of the larger picture, and that's when things get interesting. There's a good span of male and female characters here, and even the new technology, what little of it was transparent, brought texture to the story, especially the diagnostic toilets.

Three stars, just because I liked the female police officer and the plot. I liked the world Bear created too; I only regret his language choices and his stubborn refusal to explain things....less

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Slant

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