I don't read much sci-fi, but I picked up this because I follow Bear's blog and wanted to read more of her books. I brought this along on a road trip and ended up reading the entire book in one day!

"Hammered" has a very unique premise, and that is part of the appeal. Jenny Casey is almost 50, and her body is tired. She's lived half her life with a cutting-edge artificial limb and neuro technology that are no longer cutting edge - they fail a little more each day, leaving her crippled by pain and flashbacks. Old ghosts from the past began to trail her, and it turns out she's still considered an asset by the government. This all takes place in a grim 2062 where the United States is a wrecked country and Canada is a super-power (and leader in space exploration). ( )

(Amy) I still don't know what my problem was with the first two Elizabeth Bear books I read, but either I've got the knack of reading her books now, or I just picked a couple of "enh" stories to start with. I'll pick up a sequel to one of those first two one of these days, and we'll see if that's enlightening as to which theory is correct.

That, incidentally, was by way of implying that I enjoyed this book rather a lot.

The protagonist is an inexpertly-cyborged veteran of the Canadian Special Forces in a world gone rather a long way downhill from the one we live in now. She's been living in a rather unpleasant-seeming Connecticut, under the radar of pretty much everyone (but especially her home government, it seems), when suddenly she becomes very important to quite a few people, and is in no way happy about it.

I'm looking very much forward to picking up the sequels.

( http://weblog.siliconcerebrate.com/ze... ) ( )

This book didn't work for me. The core conceit of the book could be interesting: a retired Special Forces soldier with bionic parts wrestles with aging while getting swept back into geopolitical intrigue in a gritty near-future. But this book is bloated with extra themes and characters -- the mob boss with a heart of gold; a long-lost sister-enemy-rescuer; a romantic love triangle (can she trust enough not to let love slip away this time?); a rogue artificial intelligence (who seems pretty much indistinguishable from any of the other characters); the discovery of alien spaceships; a space race with a resurgent China -- and a convoluted backstory that suffers from massive moral equivalence problems: the death of a significant fraction of Earth's population carries roughly the same narrative weight as the heroine's failed romances as a young woman. The author strains to add gritty texture to the heroine's first-person narration, but it mostly makes the narrator sound tired, cranky, and unsympathetic. A final annoyance is that, although the cover blurbs won't tell you this, the book can't stand alone; only a few minor plot threads are resolved by the end of the novel - and the piece of information that provides a shocking twist for the narrator on the last page has already been revealed to the reader much earlier in the book. Since the author must have consciously chosen to structure the story this way, it's possible that she wanted to reader to have a different emotional reaction than the narrator, but I don't get it. ( )

Good story and characters. I'll be looking for the next book. ( )

Hammered is, in a word, awesome. Set in a rather bleak future, former Canadian Forces soldier Jenny Casey is hiding out in Hartford, Connecticut. Pushing fifty, badly scarred, with a cybernetic arm to replace one lost in combat, she lives in constant pain. When the enhancements she was given along with the new arm begin to degrade, one of her old commanding officers seizes the chance to get her working for him again.

This book is very much the first in a trilogy, since most of the storylines are left to be resolved in the later books. It took me a while to get into the story, but once I did, it flew by. Jenny Casey is an engaging narrator, and the other characters are equally fascinating (and many of them are equally likable.)

(Full review at my blog) ( )