Hull Zero Three

[sawyl]

Motivated by a sudden desire for space opera, I've just read Greg Bear's Hull Zero Three on the grounds of its interesting premise — a decaying colony ship — and its being shortlisted for the 2012 Arthur C. Clarke Prize.

Teacher knows just what he's going to find when he wakes up. His Dreamtime has prepared him for it. He is in orbit above his new home, a shuttle is waiting to take him, his partner and their fellow colonists down to the planet where he will shape the culture of a new civilisation. But everything he thinks he knows is wrong. He awakes hungry and thirsty and naked, his memory fractured, barely able to string his words together, in to a world where heat and gravity are intermittent and his only company is the young girl who rescued him from his support coffin.

As Teacher and the girl follow the shifting patterns of heat through the ship, meeting new companions and dodging hostile locals, his memories and his vocabulary gradually start to rebuild themselves, causing the colour and tone of his first person account to shift. Eventually, with the help of a group of friends he meets along the way, Teacher puts together the clues that explain the puzzle of what happened to the ship and filled it with a range of hostile, dysfunctional monsters.

The first person narrative works rather well. Teacher's initial amnesia, which gradually starts to lift as he struggles to survive in the hostile environment of the ship, allows Bear to bring the setting into gradual focus without too much in the way of infodumpage, allowing the character and the reader to comprehend the ship together. Teacher also becomes less dependent on the people he meets on his his journey as his memory starts to return, expanding from a character who blindly follows the girl to someone who becomes increasingly attuned to the notion that his travelling companions might have their own agendas and even that his own attitudes, shaped by his false past in the immersive Dreamtime environment, might not be as clear as he believes.

Teacher's travelling companions are interesting, especially in the way that their physical beings often seem to be at odds with their personalities. The girl consistently gives the impression of being older and better informed and, occasionally more world weary, than she has any right to be, while the character with the most detailed knowledge of physics and astrogation also happens to be the most monstrous member of the group.

The setting, the ship itself, is also strong and consistant. The hull's constant cycles of heat and cold, of spin-up and spin-down, are initially attributed to economy, to a need to ensure that everything is kept with operating tolerances without the cost of maintaining heat and gravity at all times, although it's more probable that the cycles are actually there to force the evolution of the creatures forced to live within each vessel.

While I quite liked Hull Zero One, I was unable to like it quite as much I as thought I might have done had I not read Elizabeth Bear's (no relation!) Jacob's Ladder trilogy which takes a similar setting — a vast and derelict ship, an uncertain mission, and evolutionary processes run to extremes — and does something very different with it. Something that embraces Arthurian myths and courtly love and extremely messed up families and borrows more than a bit from Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber — intriguingly, Greg Bear's use of amnesia mirrors Corwin's amnesia at the start of Nine Princes in Amber. And if I prefer E. Bear's take on derelict colony ships to G. Bear's take, that probably just a matter of tast.