HULL ZERO THREE

Greg Bear's HULL ZERO THREE (2011) is one head-scratcher of a science fiction novel. I read all 307 pages of this trade paperback and I'm still not sure I understand exactly what this one is all about. Here are the basics.

The novel is narrated by an unnamed adult, human male known only as "Teacher". He was awakened/born/created aboard an enormous star ship heading beyond our galaxy to populate an alien planet. Teacher's memories as to what's going on aboard the ship are fuzzy, hazy things and what he does recall may be entirely false, fake memories about Earth that may have been implanted but by whom and for what purpose?

But Teacher doesn't have long to contemplate this mystery because he's too busy trying to stay alive in the deadly and perilous passageways of the badly damaged ship. It's apparent that something has gone drastically wrong with the mission but whether that error occurred due to some external threat or because of shipboard war between humans and monsters, is unclear.

The humans that Teacher meet are not normal. There are two identical little girls (more, many more, of them are actually on the ship), there's another Teacher (again with others in stasis tubes/birthing cradles), there are mutated humans, designed to survive and thrive in various planetary atmospheres and environments and there are monsters, creatures designed to scour the ship and remove waste, junk and debris, who are now preying on the various human survivors.

Teacher discovers that other Teachers who have gone before him have recorded their journeys within the ship in small books. He uses one of these books as a guide and eventually joins a small band of misfit survivors including another Teacher, the two girls, a woman who has an affinity for the ship's control system, a huge man and a shape-changing monster who is actually a navigator.

The team continues to explore the mysteries of the ship's three hulls and while they discover some pretty wild, amazing stuff, the full story is never entirely revealed. As I got closer to the end of the book, I kept expecting an info dump of some kind to explain everything. But that explanation does not exist.

Bear does manage to keep you turning the pages, with almost every chapter ending on an unresolved question. The whole idea is engaging but there's ultimately just not enough of a payoff to make the whole journey worth the trip. The characters, even Teacher, the narrator, are more vividly drawn in terms of their physical appearances and odd behaviors than any emotional depth. The visuals are spectacular and there's material here just waiting to be turned into a movie.

If so, I can only hope that the screenwriter does a better job of tying things together than Bear does here. If his goal was to leave us wondering, he certainly succeeded. But I prefer a little less ambiguity in my science fiction.