Product Description

In the 21st century most of the world's population are Therapied model citizens. But a slow unwinding becoming ever faster in the heads of the Therapied attracts the attention of Mary Choy, policewoman and Martin Burke, therapist; last seen in "Queen of Angels". Together they search for a solution.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3643105 in Books
• Published on: 1997-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 349 pages

FEAR
`Bear goes beyond the petty accelerations of the future which inspire lesser writers...'

Customer Reviews

Excellent, if it's your sort of thing.
This was the first Greg Bear book I've read since Blood Music, and I loved it.

The first few chapters were quite slow, and it took some time to get into the book, but once you do it's well worth it. Bear did very well in his portrayal of a not too distant but heavily changed future and interlaced it wonderfully with a plot that makes it difficult to put down.

That is, of course, if you can get past the constantly shifting perspectives as he jumps from character to character, and the sometimes obscure Futuristic(TM) language.

Reading Queen of Angels first would probably help getting into the book at the start, but it stands up very well on it's own.

A great sequel
This is possibly my favourite Greg Bear novel, rivalling Eon, Eternity and The Forge of God. Previous reviewers criticize it for being hard to read - have they read the prequel, Queen of Angels? Bear never ceases to amaze me with his remarkable (and often apocalyptic) visions of the future. Slant is a fine example of this, but also succeeds with its characterization, particularly of the mysterious Jack Giffey and the morally complex Jonathan Bristow.

All in all, great. Looking forward to the next installment in Bear's sprawling future history.

Dull at first, picks up later, satisfying ending.
I'm normally a pretty fast reader, and I like Bear - even his big books rarely take more than a couple of days to get through, despite work commitments. So why did this one take me more than a week?

For the first 200 pages or so, I had to keep putting it down. Bear has evidently thought a lot about his future world, where "therapy" using (I think) a combination of psychological techniques & nanotechnology has managed to cure many ills, making many of the world's citizens happier & more productive. And he wants to show us this. Now, though the characters and their actions are all crucial to the plot, it initially seems as if he is using them to show us how this world works. Unfortunately, he spends too much time doing so. Eventually, the plot does pick up: the people who have benefitted from therapy are falling ill again, often worse than they were before, at an accelerating rate - eventually, there will be so many mentally disordered and emotionally dysfunctional people that society will fall apart. And no one knows why this is happening. Meanwhile, a gang of grave-robbers are preparing to break into a high-tech tomb for people who want to use cryonics to live forever.... These two threads turn out to be intimately connected - and they do lead ultimately to a satisfying conclusion.

I really would like to be able to give this book 4 crowns: But it does go on too long at first. Also, it's written in the present tense, which I'm not a great fan of - though some feel this gives a book a greater sense of immediacy, to me it just seems overly literary.

So, it's not the best Bear, but worth reading if you have nothing else to hand, and does give some food for thought.