Slant
Greg Bear is the acclaimed winner of both the Hugo and Nebula awards. He has written many books and short stories that have been praised by readers and critics alike. Earth, in the sixth decade of the twenty-first century, is a planet transformed by rapid technological advances. Nanotechnology has been refined and perfected, allowing people the ability to transform their bodies and environments on a cellular level. Artificial intelligence has become a reality and the study of the human mind and its capabilities has brought about a revolution in the practices of psychotherapy and analysis. The world should be a saner place than it was at the beginning of the new millennium. Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth…
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5mentions
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2012–2021years
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What Hacker News says
- The next few decades will be a time of progress & disparity. No doubt that technology and innovation will flourish, but access to that technology and its benefits will not be well distributed.
Greg Bear's "Queen of Angels" (and "Slant") set up a great example of this world: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_of_Angels_(novel)
- A concept explored by Greg Bear in his book Slant: https://www.amazon.com/Slant-Novel-Greg-Bear/dp/0812524829
- The first time I heard about a DNA neural network (from moss) was in the scifi book Slant by Greg Bear.
- Greg Bear wrote a number of books (Slant comes to mind, but there are others) where “Thinkers” play an important role. Not sure how they’ve aged, but interesting in that they predicted AIs as mainframe-scale things with few individual instances, back when I was thinking firmly in microcomputer terms.
- The Crest advocate, Selena Parmenter, is in her early thirties if appearances can be trusted, and she acts bored. She has said little to Mary as they wait for the deputy district director of Seattle Oversight, the honorable Clarens Lodge, to take his seat and listen to their appeals.
Oversight was created in the teens. The first states to use the procedure were California and Washington. With so much information on citizens recorded daily by vid, home monitors, fibe and satlink uploads, and neighborhood surveillance systems, a separate branch of the judiciary was established to hear appeals from those seeking to use that information for legal purposes.
Early abuses--and the far worse systematic abuse under the Raphkind presidency--has made the system painfully complex for all concerned. Each avenue of information has been wrapped in labyrinthine rules of legal engagement; and an appeal for release of data can be made only once a year for any given case.
-- Slant, Greg Bear
