Quantum Logic #04 - Slant

✍ Scribed by Greg Bear

• Publisher: Macmillan;Tor
• Year: 1998
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 281 KB
• Category: Fiction

✦ Synopsis

Amazon.com Review

This is the sequel to Greg Bear's popular __, 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.

From School Library Journal

YA?In the sixth decade of 21st-century America, violence has been eradicated and advanced therapies have relieved the suffering of the emotionally unstable. It is almost a sane and perfect world. But when Public Defender Mary Choy is called in to investigate the grizzly death of two prostitutes who were illegally transforming themselves with nano-technology (plastic surgery of the future), and an epidemic of "fallbacks" and suicides occurs as people who had gone through therapy revert to their previous states, Bear begins a complex tale that offers a vision of a society in which "dataflow" rules. The entertainment business, particularly pornography, has gone virtual, militia sympathizers and neo-Luddites are isolated in the separatist republic of Green Idaho, and the most advanced artificial intelligence in the world, Jill, is hacked by an unknown AI that is perhaps the creation of a vast conspiracy. Weaving in multiple plots, this sequel to Queen of Angels (Warner, 1994) adeptly shows the potential effects of new technology on our imagined future. Young adults will enjoy both the practical and philosophical underpinnings of this intriguing world in which bathroom fixtures diagnose illnesses, virtual film stars of the past are guests at 21st-century galas, and happiness and even the stability of society depends on nano-monitors imbedded in the soul.?Pat Bangs, Fairfax County Public Library, VA
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.