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[Book review] Hull Zero Three by Greg Bear

Hull Zero Three
Click image to purchase from Amazon
I should say up front that I’m not a fan of Greg Bear’s books.  And yet, I keep reading them.  I hear good things about his novels from other people and I keep wondering what they’re seeing that I’m not.  Perhaps his books just aren’t to my taste.  But his latest novel, Hull Zero Three, would most definitely have worked better as a novella.

The man who will come to call himself Teacher wakes, cold and naked, in the bowels of a seemingly dead spaceship.  He has no memory of how he got there or what his purpose in being there might be.  He sets off to find not only answers, but survival.

Along the way, he meets a few others with the same goals, and they slowly penetrate deep within the ship.  As they learn more, they come up with just as many questions as they answer.  What happened to this ship?  Why are they traveling the stars?  And what happened to Hull 03?


On the surface, this story is a great set-up: generational ship gone wrong, people trying to figure out how to survive, a mystery to solve.  But unlike the ship hurtling through space, this story goes nowhere fast.  After establishing some initial background, Bear repeatedly describes the same things over and over.  I understand that this is a big ship, and I understand that he wants to convey the vastness and scope of the alien environment in which the characters find themselves.  Unfortunately, the author dwells too much on this great ship that he created and drags the tale down.

Populating the story with characters who can’t remember their pasts is a mixed blessing.  On the one hand, it allows Bear to reveal the mystery to the characters in a way that also reveals it to the reader simultaneously.  On the other hand, it means that the characters spend a lot of time wandering around trying to figure out not only who they are, but why they are where they are. 

That’s why I think this story would have been better as a novella.  I have no quarrel with the basic plot, just with its execution.  Tightening up the narrative, and perhaps giving the characters a bit more knowledge to start with, would have moved this tale along at a much crisper pace.

I’ve tried to think of what to say about this book, but the overall impression that I get is that of blandness.  The ship is barren of life, the view outside the ship is nothing but the blackness of space, and the characters are mostly blank slates. 

This novel may appeal to those who really get into the background environments of outer space stories.  The book contains the seeds of a good story; however, much like the ship itself, the tale’s purpose has gone awry and gotten lost in sundry details.  I recommend waiting for Hull Zero Three to come out in paperback, and then judge for yourself.

Read an excerpt

This book was provided by the publisher.

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