The Event Horizon

3. Reviews

3.1 / (Slant) by Greg Bear, reviewed by Soh Kam Yung

When I first read ``Queen of Angels'' by Greg Bear, my first thought was, ``This is dense.'' If you ask the few SFAS members who have also read the book, you'll probably get a similar answer. ``Queen of Angels'' was dense in that it has a cast of characters inhabiting a world seemingly sculpted from the ground up using nanomachines. About the only other book I found difficult to read (as opposed to difficult to understand) is Iain M. Banks's ``Feersum Endjinn'' but that book was difficult to read for other reasons.

Fortunately, ``/ (Slant)'' is a much easier book to get into. It is a direct sequel to ``Queen of Angels'', involving many of the same characters. There is Mary Chow, the PD (public defender) who has now moved to Seattle (no sign of Microsoft in this book, though); Martin Burke, a psychologist who lost his job through illegal `mind wandering' (visiting other people's minds); and Jane, the AI who came to a different conclusion from her twin orbiting a distant star despite both getting the same inputs.

This book starts off with seemingly unconnected events: Burke gets a visit from a very rich 'therapied' person (one who has nanomachines inside the body to adjust and stabilise the body's chemistry) who is extremely disturbed. A new character, Jack Giffey, prepares to penetrate `Omphalos', a pyramid structure rumoured to hold vast riches. Mary investigates a gruesome genetic experiment. Jane gets contacted by another AI with strange and possibly powerful algorithms that can penetrate high-security firewalls. All these events meet near the end of the book to reveal a conspiracy that could bring down the entire world.

As usual, nanotechnology rules this world. But Bear shows a world in deep trouble because of nanotechnology. The rich and successful must use it because no corporation will hired `untherapied' staff with unknown mental stability (shades of `Gattaca' here). But being therapied diminishes creativity (we all known geniuses are somewhat `unstable'), causing some to go to the opposite extreme (you'll find out what extreme from this book), while reducing innovation and the `zest' for life in this society.

All this (and more) are treated in this book. It's still full of new concepts as well as giving a fun treatment of nanomachines (the best and most chilling part is where military-grade nanomachines are use to create new war machines on the spot). As a direct sequel, it's best if you read this after ``Queen of Angels'' but that's just to get a feel of the world that Bear envisions.

As for the strange title of the story, well it can be interpreted in several ways. The `slant' symbol can be interpreted as the division between two choices (and/or) or as the dividing line between two disparate events, characters, man and woman or as an indication of a massive change before and after an event. All those possible meanings are shown in this book.

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