Slant
From AwardAnnals
| Book: | Slant |
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| Author: | Greg Bear |
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| Publisher: | Tor Books |
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. Data is the great treasure of the new millennium, and Giffey plans to tap into the Omphalos dataflow, to steal the knowledge gathered by the inhabitants of the Omphalos.
Public Defender Mary Choy, now living in Seattle, has been called in on the bizarre suicide (or murder) of a very wealthy, secretive man. His last recordings hint at some terrible guilty secret. Choy would very much like to know what such a man—rich and politically powerful—might have done that he could no longer live with. And in the offices of Mind Design, Inc., Jill, 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?
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Reviews
Amazon.com
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.
