n the debut novel by Elizabeth Bear (no relation to acclaimed SF writer Greg Bear), Hammered (2005), we were introduced to protagonist Jenny Casey and her large cast of supporting characters. Jenny is nearly 50, a decorated but traumatized war veteran in sad shape, thanks to deteriorating mil-spec cyber-implants. Self-appointed guardian of the mean streets of Hartford, Conn., in the grim Greenhouse Earth environment of 2062, Jenny finds the seemingly simple case of a drug-overdosed youth leading her back to her former life in the Canadian Armed Forces. She is recruited by old nemesis Col. Fred Valens to become a starship pilot. Also on board the project are Gabe Castaign, who eventually becomes her lover, and Elspeth Dunsany, who has managed to create the first real AI, who considers himself "the ghost of [famous physicist] Richard Feynman." By the end of this novel, Jenny is mentally hosting Richard and ready to fly the Montreal, a starship reverse-engineered from mysterious artifacts on Mars, left by the race dubbed the Benefactors.
The new book picks up precisely where the old one ended. Jenny is onboard the Montreal doing shakedown routines. At the same time, new young candidates for pilot school are receiving Benefactor implants and beginning training. Among this group is Gabe's own daughter Leah and Valens' granddaughter Patty. This whole project, however, is off the books and privately funded, by the massive firm known as Unitek, run by the merciless Alberta Holmes. Canadian Prime Minister Constance Riel knows something major is happening aboard the Montreal and is determined to discover what. At the same time, the rival Chinese ship, the Huang Di, piloted by a man named Xie Min-xue, is maneuvering to beat the Canadians to the stars. But not in a fair race. The Chinese plan sabotage and a terrorist attack on Earth of an unprecedented nature.
Jenny and her brain-borne partner, Richard, must track down the saboteurs, prevent the Canadian government from interfering with the mission, deal with a radical girl named Indigo Xu (who is bent on assassinating Holmes) and manage her love life, just for starters. Plenty for anyone to handle, even a six-billion-dollar woman.
Post-cyberpunk apocalypse
Elizabeth Bear just won the John W. Campbell award for most promising newcomer at this year's World SF Convention in Glasgow. These two books surely show immense promise and a degree of fulfillment, more than enough to merit the accolades.
Bear deftly creates believable characters who walk into your heart and mind easily. Jenny's plight evokes ready sympathy, as she struggles to balance the harsh and soft elements of her character. Second-line players are equally well-rounded, including Razorface, the Hartford criminal, Gabe Castaign, who is juggling another lover beside Jenny, and even Valens, who demonstrates a side other than manipulative and single-minded.
As for Bear's grasp of the genre's history, she exhibits an admirable fluency, incorporating such meaty tropes as ansible communicators into her tale. Her speculations are not radically unique, but they are arrayed in coherent, well-imagined ways. (Although I doubt that in an era that pumps nanites into the human bloodstream, a can of WD-40 would still be employed for much.) The backstory elements are inserted deftly.
Bear's prose is easy on the mind's ears, her dialogue generally crisp and lifelike. Although I do wish her characters weren't prone to using such stale rejoinders as "don't teach your grandmother to suck eggs" and "your mother wears combat boots."
All in all, then, is Bear the perfect model of the budding SF writer? Not quite. There's the matter of bloat.
These two books and the forthcoming third, Worldwired, are going to total almost 1,000 pages.
My omnibus volume of Asimov's The Foundation Trilogy—a series that deals with scores of characters over millennia-weighs in at roughly 700 pages. Now, it's true that writers differ in how they treat their material, some opting for broad strokes while others pile on the details. But there has to be an underlying armature of story sufficient to support the latter style of story-telling.
There's simply not enough story here for a trilogy. I can envision the entire story arc—as given in the first two books and as projected into the third—boiled down to the most kickass single novel to hit the field in decades. But instead, we get chapters like the one that spans pages 88 to 91, in which the emotional relations among Gabe, Elspeth and Jenny, already well-known, are dramatized by a visit to a diner and a pinball game, disclosing no new information. Verisimilitude? Fine writing? Needed characterization? Or just filler? Your mileage may vary from mine, but I deem it the last-named. Multiply by numerous other examples, and what could be a swift, suspenseful, headlong tale bogs down—not irredeemably, but to its detriment.
