A review by pastathief
Hull Zero Three by Greg Bear

4.0

A good number of people found this story weak and derivative, and I can't argue there, at least with the latter part. All of my descriptions start with, "It's kind of like X." You might go so far as to say that all the generation-ship ideas have been wrung dry, and that might be true. However, I love the genre, and this is one of the few really good *concise* examples. Generation ships by their very nature tend to go on at quite a bit of length, and jump into multi-part series at the drop of a hat. Hull Zero Three is a compact, tightly-paced, exciting whirlwind of a tale in comparison. It packs a lot of thrills while throwing in enough brain candy to satisfy, if not necessarily to be life-changing. The urgency drains out of the book somewhat toward the end of the book, but the wider plot picks up the slack nicely. In some ways this is just the kind of bait-and-switch that Hollywood keeps pulling where they promise a taut science fiction thriller but then turned it into slashy horror in the second act, and perhaps it disappoints some people in the same way (being neither wholeheartedly either horror or cerebral science fiction, really), but I think that if you watched Pandorum despite your better judgment and came away wishing someone would do that story right, then this is probably a book for you.

(Note that I read it as an audiobook, which meant it lasted somewhere between six and eight hours for me. This probably affected my perception of investment and pacing. It might work less well on paper, as you might expect more of it or have wanted it to be shorter for what it delivered.)