Review: Hammered

Hammered is a 2005 science-fiction novel by Elizabeth Bear — her debut novel, and the first in an untitled trilogy consisting also of Scardown and Worldwired.

It's a little odd that there's no name for the series: Hammered isn't at all a complete novel on its own, and I expect (once I've read the others) that it will make more sense to consider all three of them to be a single novel sold in three parts. In the meantime, I"ll follow the convention of the Japanese translation and call it the Cyborg Shikan Jenny Casey trilogy, or Saishijenkei for short. ^_^

Yeah, no, not really.

Hammered is set in the year 2062, in a dystopia that I can only hope future SF readers will look back on and say, "oh, this was written during the second Bush administration, wasn't it?" The details are largely unimportant, however, except to ground the setting. (At least for the duration of Hammered; the excerpt from Scardown in the back of the book brings the ecological problems into focus.) Moore's Law has proceeded apace, and neural interfaces are just becoming reasonably safe.

The protagonist (as you may have discerned) is one Jenny Casey, veteran of a war some twenty-five years past, who has a working prosthetic left hand, controlled by the predecessor of the neural-interface technology that becomes important. Along the way, as we follow her, we're treated to wrecked alien starships on Mars, tainted Canadian Special Forces combat drugs being leaked onto the streets, quasipolitical/quasicorporate intrigue, and a benign rogue AI with the memories and name of Richard Feynman.

Unfortunately, almost none of this fits together coherently, at least not yet. The book ends as the overarching story is just beginning to come together. It's a coherent read, as far as it goes, but it just kind of ... cuts off. I don't have the other two books to hand to review the whole thing properly, and trying to do it to Hammered alone would involve event-spoilers just to start explaining.

So, what do I say? The setting is coherent and plausible (although I hope I don't still think that ten years from now), and the characters so far seem to be more than just cardboard cutouts — even the antagonists. On the other hand it doesn't have anything like a reasonable stopping point, and I've had promising series turn sour on me too many times before to grant the Jenny Casey books any points on potential. In the end I'll have to remain undecided, and give it `(1/sqrt2|\bb1:) + 1/sqrt2|\bb1:))` out of `\bb1`.