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menkaur's review against another edition
4.0
I believe, somewhere I saw a version of the book with the "science stripped out". For a book this short, the character surely talks a lot. But overall, the story is enjoyable. A nice page turner
lordofthemoon's review against another edition
4.0
I man awakes naked and confused on the deck of a spaceship that is trying to kill him, with no memory of where or who he is. He has to stay alive long enough to try and figure out what's gone wrong with the ship and to find the answers that may be found in the mysterious Hull Zero Three.
This is a pretty tense SF-horror, although perhaps thriller would be a better description than horror, since although it was tense and kept me turning pages, I didn't feel the sense of personal discomfort that horror often realises in me (one reason why I avoid the genre). The trope of the small group of survivors on a large spaceship, with things trying to kill them is an old one, but Bear pulls it off here, with the central mystery being strong enough to keep me reading.
A colony ship that can create creatures from the templates in its gene banks, a war on the ship, conscience and metaphysics all pull together to form a compelling narrative, even if the final chapters were slightly confusing.
This is a pretty tense SF-horror, although perhaps thriller would be a better description than horror, since although it was tense and kept me turning pages, I didn't feel the sense of personal discomfort that horror often realises in me (one reason why I avoid the genre). The trope of the small group of survivors on a large spaceship, with things trying to kill them is an old one, but Bear pulls it off here, with the central mystery being strong enough to keep me reading.
A colony ship that can create creatures from the templates in its gene banks, a war on the ship, conscience and metaphysics all pull together to form a compelling narrative, even if the final chapters were slightly confusing.
sucrose's review against another edition
challenging
mysterious
slow-paced
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
1.0
arbieroo's review against another edition
2.0
Cataloguing everything wrong with this book would take an age. Suffice to say poor writing combined with poor plotting leaves me frustrated with another Bear novel that had enough interesting ideas to give it a fairly generous two stars. As with previous books I've read by him, I find that the material would probably have suited another writer much better. In this case, Alastair Reynolds, who would have delighted in the Gothic horror elements and in fact wrote a vastly superior novella, Slow Bullets, that somewhat overlaps in territory.
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