25 May 2005

Hammered by Elizabeth Bear
Bantam Spectra, 2005
Reviewed by K. Joyce Tsai

K. Joyce Tsai is a compulsive reader who started blogging on books this past year. She graduated from Princeton with a degree in East Asian Studies and a certificate in Japanese. She currently works in an area completely unrelated to anything she has been studying.

To be honest, I wasn't particularly enthusiastic about picking up Elizabeth Bear's debut Hammered. I don't often read science fiction set in the near future, particularly if it has a cyberpunk bent, which is how this book is being marketed. However, I grew more interested when I realized that the book's protagonist, Jenny Casey, was a bitter ex-soldier nearing her fiftieth birthday. It's unfortunate that older women, especially as protagonists, are so rare in science fiction and fantasy that just reading the description of Jenny delighted me.

Jenny Casey lives in Hartford, Connecticut in 2062, in a world where the United States is run by a fundamentalist government and Canada has stepped up as the world's peacekeeping force. A former member of the Canadian Special Forces, Jenny must hide from the very government that has provided her with an artificially augmented body. Her augmentations are now deteriorating, complicating everything Jenny does. In Toronto, Dr. Elspeth Dunsany finally leaves prison to make a deal with the devil, and the teenaged Leigh Castaign makes friends with a strangely familiar personage on the internet. All of them will impact Jenny's life and drag her back to confront her past.

The dystopian, gritty future Bear has created and that world's pessimistic view of the government and the military both feel over-familiar, and the subplot concerning children and virtual reality reminds me of Tad Williams' Otherland series. However, I do like the way Bear inclues the reader, leaving enough to the imagination. Even though there isn't that much that is startlingly new about the setting, her dropped hints are tantalizing enough to leave me wondering about the exact history of the world.

Rather, the strength of Hammered lies in its characters. While Jenny remains the protagonist, the book has multiple point-of-view characters, though it is slightly disconcerting for Jenny's sections to be the only ones in first person. The book is populated not only with several strong female characters, but also with characters of color. Again, I wish that this weren't so uncommon that the inclusion of these types of characters in Hammered is a bonus. Furthermore, I greatly appreciate how each of the female characters has her own unique strengths and weaknesses. There is no ur-Female as there can often be in some books, in which every single female character seems to be made in the same mold. Bear also doesn't make the characters into assorted stereotypes like the Earth Mother, the Spunky Girl or the Sexy Mysterious Woman.

Bear partly accomplishes this by emphasizing the relationships between the female characters. While there are a few romantic entanglements in the book, the women still manage to bond on their own level, apart from the men. Bear neatly takes care of the romantic triangle that arises without unnecessarily vilifying or dumbing down any of the characters. Given the prevalence of annoying romantic triangles in fiction, this is a skill in and of itself. Also, Jenny's relationships with other women span the spectrum, from budding friendship to sister to aunt.

While I appreciated the female characters in Hammered, my favorite part of the book was actually the artificial intelligence, whose identity delighted me so much that I don't want to spoil it for future readers.

Overall, Hammered is a well-written debut, and Bear's deft treatment of the characters and their relationships pushed the book up to keeper level. While I might not recommend the book to science fiction fans who are more interested in world building and inventive ideas, I would gladly hand it over to anyone who would appreciate a broader spectrum of strong female characters to choose from, particularly in the realm of speculative fiction.