The smart (and lazy) advocate for cyberpunk would probably reply that it doesn’t have a strict definition, but is a loose generic term for a body of writers utilising the language of modern technology...

To be honest, my personal opinion is that cyberpunk is crap. Cowboys and Indians storylines, with a load of computer gibberish thrown in as padding. The term was foisted on us by merchants trying to persuade us to buy several products by lumping them under a general label. The good writers who had found themselves lumbered with the tag – Gibson, Shirley and a few others, including Bear – have survived on the strength of their writing itself.

Greg Bear for my money stands head and shoulders above the rest, combining virtuoso technique with a consistent imagination and an insight into human socio-psychological complexities. He’s also the only one who suggests a genuine understanding of the ‘hard’ scientific data woven into his plots.

Slant is a sequel to Queen Of Angels and contains several characters familiar to anyone who may have read it. It can, however, be read independently. The plot is told from the alternating perspectives of several people and is too complex for me to summarise here in a way which would do it justice. The fundamental concerns of the book revolve around human desires, needs, disillusionment and madness. In a world almost totally ordered and ‘therapied’, things start to crumble. It’s a familiar story – and pertinent to contemporary society NOW.

To quote JG Ballard – "It is a curious paradox that almost all science fiction, however far removed in time and space, is really about the present day." The characters are familiar to us. However strange Bear’s future world is, people’s problems are still the problems that westerners of today are suffering with.

Mary Choy, a policewoman, tries to balance her career with her private life (or lack of one) and hides her deep seated insecurities and self-loathing under a veneer of professionalism and toughness. She undergoes ‘transform’ - a futuristic equivalent of plastic surgery – in an attempt to make herself more desirable, but is only hiding from herself. Jonathan and Chloe Bristow are a typical American middle class couple – he conservative and ambitious, she liberal and long-suffering. She begins to have a nervous breakdown as she realises that on a repressed level she actually hates her life and family. And so on.

All in all it’s very typically American and the concerns of the novel mirror the contemporary anxieties and culture-shock of that part of the world as technology evolves and human beings cannot keep up. Madness – as Artaud once defined it – is often the only honourable retreat from an unacceptable and unresolveable situation. Whether the future does in fact hold any of the dangers and/or delights of Slant is questionable. But as a commentary on our current way of life Slant is a masterpiece. In the ad blurbs on the dust-jacket Bear is compared to Arthur C Clarke – a backhanded compliment. I see him as the closest contender to date for the seat once occupied by HG Wells. Read this book.