Slant (novel)
Bear, Greg. Slant. London, UK: Legend, 1997. Part of the QUEEN OF ANGELS SERIES.[1] For alternative title of "/", reprints, other media, and reviews, see Slant entry in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, as of Nov. 2022 at linked page here.[2]
Reviewed by Alexander von Thorn, SF Site, as of 6 November 2022 available without paywall at link here.[3]
A new class of pharaohs grasps at immortality from cryogenically-frozen capsules in a new-age high-tech pyramid. [...] Performers commit pornography of the soul, sharing their sexual and emotional experience with an audience of millions through a direct neural link, the Yox. [...] A silicon-based artificial intelligence encounters a being even stranger than herself. [...]
The surfeit of cryptic jargon, the dark cynicism and political allegory, the motif of mutilation, of direct neural interface to universes of information -- William Gibson pioneered this [cyberpunk] territory in the 80s. Throw in dollops of online banter at the beginning of chapters and this story is reminiscent of a Shadowrun novel. Which is too bad, because the author is writing as much in the tradition of Aldous Huxley and Alvin Toffler[4] as William Gibson. [...]
Slant is set in a dark utopia. [...]. The setting is not one being changed by nanotech, it's a place that has already been transformed. [...] Trouble is, in a post-industrial post-scarcity economy where machines can satisfy every need, people who in ages past would have formed the working class simply have no role at all. They become disaffected, having nothing to do but submerge themselves in the Yox.
For the issue of the working class, see Vonnegut's Player Piano novel and Robert Harding's essay, "Manuel Castells's Technoculture Epoch in The Information Age."
RDE, finishing, 6Nov22