Hull Zero Three by Greg Bear

Hull Zero Three by Greg Bear

My rating: 2 of 5 stars




From Goodreads.com:  A starship hurtles through the emptiness of space. Its destination - unknown. Its purpose - a mystery.  Now, one man wakes up. Ripped from a dream of a new home - a new planet and the woman he was meant to love in his arms - he finds himself wet, naked, and freezing to death. The dark halls are full of monsters but trusting other survivors he meets might be the greater danger.
All he has are questions -- Who is he? Where are they going? What happened to the dream of a new life? What happened to Hull 03?
 
All will be answered, if he can survive the ship.

This was December's book group selection.  Group thought it was a dud.

Not sure what to think of this.  Not sure at all.  A rather strange story about a generation ship gone bad, a fight for survival where the characters didn't know who was friend or foe, other than the obvious trying to kill them.  A fantastical world of three hulls, of internal decay, of life perverted, of memories that were not real and a situation that was growing worse.

I had trouble visualizing much of the internal structures of the hulls as they were described. It felt like the author was trying too hard to make this grandiose stage, where simplicity would have served better. Further, the situation seemed almost fantastical to the point of being unbelievable. 

I didn't care for the name-switch mid book: where Big Yellow (or some such) suddenly becomes Kim, Teachers are now Sanjay or Sanjim, Tall Grey is Nell, and only the Tracker keeps her true-name.  There seemed to be a lot of concepts that were started and aborted, much like the characters themselves, knowing they had been previously birthed, and died, but having no idea how or how many times and are left to continuously puzzle out their function.  

The one cool concept I liked in the story was the books, where you looked for your book that would tell you what had happened up to a point, a book that would fill in missing memories. 

Other than that, this left me with more questions than answers, more perplexed than not.  Recommended with reservations.



View all my reviews