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A review by chalicotherex
Hull Zero Three by Greg Bear
3.0
A generation ship story that starts off like a bad video game - amnesiac protagonist, creepy girl, monsters stalking them through the ship. But it gets better. Eventually it even swings around to have the opposite problem, of too many ideas competing for attention.
My big problem with the second half is that the characters have been so thoroughly gaslighted by the ship (clones with implanted memories, being fought over by different factions in the ship) that I found it hard to believe their decisions.
I really liked Tsinoy, the mind of a navigator cloned into a ferocious porcupine battle cat thing, the idea being that a navigator is so important to the generation ship's survival that she's deserving of all the best defence mechanisms that evolution can provide.
It tackles some of the same questions about the ethics of the generation ship story that KSR handled better in his novel Aurora. Some of the writing reminded me favourably of Matthew Woodring Stover.
My big problem with the second half is that the characters have been so thoroughly gaslighted by the ship (clones with implanted memories, being fought over by different factions in the ship) that I found it hard to believe their decisions.
I really liked Tsinoy, the mind of a navigator cloned into a ferocious porcupine battle cat thing, the idea being that a navigator is so important to the generation ship's survival that she's deserving of all the best defence mechanisms that evolution can provide.
It tackles some of the same questions about the ethics of the generation ship story that KSR handled better in his novel Aurora. Some of the writing reminded me favourably of Matthew Woodring Stover.