Book Review – Hammered – Elizabeth Bear – 2005

Before I go any further let me say of the ½ dozen used sci-fi books I read for this exercise, this is the one I liked the most!

6th book of the armful of old sci-fi novels that I picked up at my local used store, Valley Wild Books in Littleton, MA.

Guess what?  Another debut novel!  That’s three out of six randomly chosen used books that ended up being that author’s first novel.  It was the first in a trilogy of this character – Master Warrant Officer Jenny Casey.  I’ll need to go find the other two now.

Elizabeth Bear wrote Hammered in a transitional period of science fiction.  This was right before the iPhone was introduced.  It was at the tail end of the 90’s cyberpunk wave.  It was at a time when traditional publishing was flopping around like a fish on the floor gasping for breath.

It’s a good book.

I saved it for last, because I didn’t really like the cover art.  It was stylistically early 2000’s and I thought that the book might be silly.

But it was not.  It was good.  So the joke is on me and whoever chose that cover art.

I liked the man character.  A classic anti-hero.  A conflicted combat veteran, who is augmented and tormented and just wants to be left alone.  The action builds well.  The conclusion is satisfying.

The multiple timelines take a little bit to figure out.  In a lot of books you can skip the chapter headings, but in this one you really need to read them to orient yourself in time and place.

I loved the use of Hartford Connecticut as a dystopian future, and I loved the Canadians as the ones who rode out the dystopia most successfully.

This book justified my excursion into the dusty corners of the used sci-fi underworld in search of treasure.

This book here was the diamond in the rough.

Cheers!

Chris Russell

ChrisRussellAuthor dot com