You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing — that's what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.
--Richard Feynman, Physisist and Educator
In
Hammered,
Elizabeth Bear's semi-dystopian science-fiction novel, many characters try to name Jenny Casey: "Maker", "Master Warrant Officer", sister, lover, soldier, cyborg, medic. But what is she
doing?
SPOILER NOTE: I didn't really think I was getting into spoiler territory, but I notice that Elizabeth Bear on
her blog suggested that I had, so consider yourself warned!
Well, at the beginning, she's hiding from a painful past, using her combat training to patch up injured kids from the local gang. Her cybernetic implants and prosthetics are ancient by the current standards, causing her daily pain and getting worse. To Jenny, the pain and her extensive scars seem only fitting. She keeps her head down, unwilling to ask for help from the people who did this to her in the first place. Or did she really do it to herself?
But late one night, when the local ganglord, an imposing, but charismatic figure who goes by "Razorface", brings in an ODing kid. Par for the course, until she realizes that this is no normal OD. This kid is dying from an overdose of highly classified Canadian military battle drugs. She knows them on sight, as well she should. After all, she took quite a few herself back in the day. But where did this kid get them? And what does it have to do with the cop who recently got assassinated? Can it be a coincidence that Jenny's estranged sociopathic sister has been spotted in the area?
And all that is just the beginning...
In Hammered, the story keeps getting bigger and bigger, eventually appropriating international intrigue, sentient AI's, jailed scientists and even top-secret starships. At times, it feels like it doesn't all quite belong in the same story, but for me, the strength of the characters held it all together, even when I had a little trouble following all of the labyrinthine inner workings of the plot.
It's not a perfect book, but then, few books are. As I mentioned above, I had a little trouble at times connecting some of the plot's more disparate threads. A pair of the characters are bilingual, and while that adds texture, I did get a little impatient with some scenes where a lot of their dialogue was in French, and I had to guess at their meanings through context alone. I also felt that, as with so many dystopian novels, that there is occasionally a suggestion that the present day political struggles are going to be the downfall of life as we know it, rather than just another of the debates that rage intensely for a while and then begin to fade into the background again as a new controversy arises.
However, all of my complaints are really quite minor, and forgivable, as what is good in the story eclipses them almost completely. The book hooked me right from the start, and my interest never waned, even when I wasn't entirely clear on everything that was happening. Plus, one of the things that a complex plot can provide is a sense of texture and connectedness that really provided a great mood while reading. Everything had a history, and each new revelation made me want to know more.
In addition, the book, particularly in the last act, has a couple of truly thrilling sequences, including an extended gun-battle and chase, as some of our good guys try to track down and neutralize an extremely dangerous individual.
Yet, it is really the characters that made the book for me. The characters are grown-ups, not just in physical age, but also in psychological complexity and maturity. People have intricate motives, some of them mutually exclusive, and we all maneuver through our lives constantly trying to prioritize them, to balance achieving our own desires with protecting the people we care about, and this story captured that in multiple characters in a way that so many SF novels don't. In many books, the characters are bland ciphers that serve the plot, or they have some "defining characteristic" a single trait that is somehow supposed to explain their whole personality. Real people aren't like that, and neither are the characters in this story. I really appreciated that.
The author uses an interesting technique for her multiple point-of-view characters by following all of them in a tight third-person except for Jenny herself, who tells her own scenes in first person. This allows the story to follow all of the seperate plot threads through scenes where Jenny isn't present, while at the same time making it clear that it is ultimately Jenny's story.
And so I return to Jenny. She makes a fascinating protagonist and I really cared about her. Rather than try to define her for you, I refer back to the quote above. It's better to watch her and see what she
does. You can find her in
Hammered.
In fact, about the worst thing I can really say about the book is that the sequel,
Scardown, won't be out until this Summer.
Name:Christiana Ellis
Name:Mike Meitín
