Slant

I need to compare intra-book year dates because this one started out a bit confusing. You end the last book with Mars doing it's dance and then you are back at what I can only guess is after [b:Queen of Angels|410766|Queen of Angels (Queen of Angels, #1)|Greg Bear|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1387171351s/410766.jpg|4272]--which...is just a tad confusing.

Let's abstract then and just dove-tail it behind book #1. Yay, makes a bunch more sense. It's been a little time but not a lot and we rejoin Choy, Martain, Jill and new cast members. We return to a world in confusion and something dark unfurling the human condition that was thought to be truly conditioned.

Once again we dive into the shady realm of humanity, it's goals, it's desires, fabrications, truths, perceptions, and more.

As an aside I think this entire series would make a great 3+ year television series. QoA #3 would be a great mini-movie segway tucked in there. Otherwise I felt episodic shows as I read most of these books that would translate very easily. Most of what is envisioned is person-to-person relationships and psyche dives. Not a huge 'future-tek' 3d investment needed. Random digression I agree, but thought I'd share.

So! A lot of energy to start, something to go wrong, something going wrong, thinkers getting lost thinking, good-ol-boys both high level and low level types trying to 'preserve' their spaces through all sorts of in the end, idiocy, but how it is wrought is deep enough to give you understanding. However, like Bear does with most of his books not deep enough to give you a rock solid foundation. You get enough to get by, maybe a pinch more on some tougher concepts and then that's all you need--let's 'roll that beautiful bean footage.'

I think we are done here though. The characters feel at rest. The story has an end. The world has both its past and its future to create but that will not be done here. If you want another good novel and you've traveled this far I think you'll enjoy it. I would however ponder stuffing this in behind the first book if you want more continuity of story. FWIW.

I like Greg Bear a lot, because he definitely doesn't forget the "science" in "science-fiction". Darwin's Radio/Darwin's Children was, in my opinion, spectacular (although if I remember correctly the first one is better than the second one). For some reason, though, I enjoy them when reading them, but I usually can't remember them that well afterwards - Blood Music and Eon/Eternity are a good illustration of that - I know I liked them, but I just can't remember what/who they were about.
I guess Slant will have the same "impact" - I liked it, I don't think it will stay in my memory for long. The basic idea is that, in a pretty near future, nanotechnology is... everywhere. In particular, it's used on a fair fraction of the people as "therapy" - to correct chemical imbalances that are the source of diverse "suboptimal" mental states. Oh, and this is also a future where AI can become self-aware.
But what happens when therapy begins to fail on a large scale, a secret society builds a gigantic complex (supposedly a cryogenic facility), and AIs are not built the way they should be built? That's what Greg Bear explores in Slant.
He does that through a hanful of characters, whose point of views we follow alternatively along the book. What the characters have in common is not clear at the beginning - and the fact that the end is kind of confusing makes the relationships not that obvious at the end.
The depicted future is pretty believable in my opinion, but the characters are forgettable and the plot is kind of messy. So it's one for the "not bad, but not great" category.