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November 2007
Women Kicking Butt: The Jenny Casey Trilogy by Elizabeth Bear
Hammered (2005), Bantam Spectra, ISBN 9780553587500
J.G. Stinson has been reading SF, fantasy and horror fiction for over 35 years. Strange Horizons, The New York Review of Science Fiction and the Internet Review of Science Fiction (among others) have published her reviews and essays, and she was a contributor to The Cherryh Odyssey (edited by Edward Carmien, Wildside Press, 2004), an author study of C. J. Cherryh.
Ever wonder why reviewers seldom (if ever) review trilogies or series these days? Easy answer: most of them never end. Who to blame? Readers and publishers. To be specific, readers who feel they can't leave certain worlds and/or characters behind (because they're the verbal equivalent of comfort food), and publishers who read those readers' letters begging for more and compare them to the sales figures of the maybe-trilogy/series' first book and see dollar signs. I have trouble blaming the writers. They have to eat, too, and if publishers won't buy their non-series novels, what else can they do, realistically, but write series that sell? It's a capitalist economy here in the U.S. and many other countries, after all. Who am I to begrudge publishing houses' employees from earning their living? I'm a reader who likes a challenge, that's who—one who eats actual comfort food when she wants comfort, and who freely admits that there are some stories in certain worlds yet to be told by her favorite authors that she'd love to read. But I haven't written one of those letters yet. Why should I feed the disease called Series-itis? Others are doing a splendid job all on their own. Cranky? Oh, you betcha. The trilogy under consideration here could yet turn into a series, except that the writer is apparently too busy starting new books to have time for that now. And I thank whatever Higher Beings there are for that. Elizabeth Bear made a noticed entrance into the halls of SF with Hammered, an SF thriller featuring ex-Canadian Army (CA) soldier Jenny Casey, who's hiding in Hartford, Connecticut from her own government because she wants them to stop fiddling with her biology. Luckily for her, the U.S.-Canada border is closed. She has 20-year-old cybernetic enhancements that give her fits, off and on, and chronic pain which causes her to drink more alcohol than is good for her. She also has an addiction to rigathalonin, a chemical enhancer used by the Canadian Army to increase reaction time and stimuli processing on the battlefield, which has permanently altered her metabolism. Rigathalonin is a classified military drug (known in the CA as the Hammer), supposedly unavailable to civilians—but it's somehow gotten into the hands of dealers in her neighborhood, and it's deadly. Casey, who still has flashbacks from her combat experiences and tends to keep people at a distance so she won't hurt them, has set herself up as the local medico in her neighborhood. She has an ally in a gangster named Razorface, who wants to know where the Hammer came from and make it go away—permanently. Problem is, there's more behind the Hammer than just money. Her old boss wants her back, the man who saved her life once in a combat zone is also her secret love (but he doesn't know it), and a certain Casey family member has shown up in Hartford for all the wrong reasons. Casey will be sucked back into military life because she has an honor code, and a shameful secret for which she hopes to one day atone. She has an eagle feather from her sister, Nell, and maybe her Mohawk ancestors are whispering in her ear that she has things yet to do before she joins them. The relationships explored in this trilogy are wide ranging. Casey's relationship with the widower (and her rescuer) Gabriel Castaign and his two daughters is fraught with hesitation, doubt, complexity—all the hallmarks of "real" relationships. Add in another woman, Elspeth Dunsany (an A.I. scientist who went to jail rather than give the Canadian government her "creation," an A.I. she calls Richard Feynman who—or is it which?—spontaneously achieved sentience), and the tension ratchets up higher at the possibility of a triad. Col. Fred Valens is, at first, someone the reader wants to loathe, until we see glimpses of his home life and, eventually, his real motivations, which aren't as far from Jenny Casey's as she thinks. Razorface and Casey are allies in the battle to stay alive in a war-torn Hartford, but that relationship grows as well. Castaign's relationship as a father with his daughters is as complex as any parent-child bond could be; Leah and Genie aren't just cardboard stand-ins, they're real people with their own motivations. Then there's the relationship between Col. Valens and the Canadian Prime Minister, Constance Riel: the reader may surmise that she doesn't really trust him any further than she could throw him, but that's only a starting point. The only relationship that doesn't change is between Casey and her other sister, Barbara, but there's a good reason for that. The fact that there are five major female characters and at least three minor ones in these books is a welcome sight. While this trilogy has aliens, spaceships, gunfights and other familiar science-fictional elements, it is, primarily, about relationships. Jenny Casey spent years distancing herself from everyone she loved or even cared about, trying not to increase the guilt she feels over Nell's death and her own combat experiences. Her episodes of post-traumatic stress syndrome are pretty hairy, too; she can barely control them, and sometimes she can't control them at all. Like any truly depicted warrior, all she really wants is peace, but she fights when she has to—for self-preservation, protection of those she loves, honor, patriotism. Speaking of aliens, that story thread is one of the more refreshing treatments of aliens seen in several years from SF writers. They're not even humanoid. How do humans communicate with them, then? Bear's explanation is ingenious, and not one I've seen before. But that's just a taste of what goes on in these books. There's one of the better love scenes ever written near the end of Hammered, an evocative portrait of a young man who must choose between his country and his conscience in Scardown, and the wonder of space flight interlaced through everything else in all three novels. The technical fault that might cause some readers either confusion or irritation—or both—involves human languages. Casey speaks a lot of French, and while my French is a little better thanks to watching reruns of Forever Knight on DVD recently, the richness of that language is mostly lost on me. Sadly, my facility with French has faded with the decades since I learned it in elementary and middle school. Yes, readers can guess the meanings in some places, and Bear provides either direct or inferred translation in other places, but there's still missing parts. Less French, or more translations, might have improved the reading experience for those who are only English speakers. Only one thing Bear did in these books didn't "feel" right, and that was naming three space-going shuttlecraft after Canadian singer-songwriters. To someone who's never heard of any of them, it probably doesn't matter, but I listened to all of them when I was growing up. Perhaps it's a "Canadian" thing to do—but I think the U.S. naming a shuttle craft the John Denver or James Taylor would be somehow off, too. It's probably the enculturation of military-ship-naming traditions America inherited from the British that's making this admittedly minor element so dissonant to me. May it matter less to other readers. That said, the Jenny Casey trilogy is definitely worth one's time. Let's hope it doesn't get ruined by being turned into a series. |
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