I’ve had a rocky relationship with Greg Bear books. They always look interesting, but when I read them, I’m ultimately unsatisfied. And it’s never anything I can point to and say “I didn’t like that”. It just a vague sense of not liking it. I recognize that Bear is a good writer and there are a lot of fans (and critics) who love his work, but he’s never really appealed to me. Having said that, I decided to try his latest book Hull Zero Three.

A man is woken up from a container where he was having a shared dream about being on a colonization ship. It’s a little girl who wakes him up and leads him around. He finds himself awake on a ship and is very confused, not remembering his name or other vital details. An unknown monster or thing attacks and takes away the girl and others they had run into, but he escapes and ends up finding another girl and people who look just like the ones who were taken away. They take him to the container area where he sees whole rows of containers full of people who look just like him. There is obviously something strange going on.

Only at this point I’m 100-150 pages in and I no longer care. I am not interested in any of the characters or the central mystery. I just can’t bring myself to continue. Again it’s probably just my view of Greg Bear’s work. Hull Zero Three has decent reviews in other forums, but it just isn’t a book for me.