Customer Reviews

Hammered (Jenny Casey)

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

This was the story of a former soldier, embedded with older tech implants, who agrees to upgrades to end her constant pain, only to find the doctor pressing her to upgrade has ulterior motives.

What worked for me: the storyline was interesting, and I liked the characters. The author's writing style is comfortable, unpretentious and direct. The science and story presented are plausible and the plot elements were well-constructed. I didn't find myself dying to get back to the book, but neither was it a struggle to get through, thus I gave it 3 stars: I liked it, didn't love it.

What didn't work for me: I dislike stories written in present tense, and I dislike leaping from first person to third person narrators. This book had both, so it constantly pushed my buttons. At about the half-way point, two of the characters began speaking French to each other, and my French is too rusty to have made it all out. I believe this was a strategic mistake on the part of the author. It's like forming a special clique of readers who get all of the story, and everyone else is left out.

Still, I'd recommend this book to SF fans, and I'll be buying the sequel.

Let me start by saying I am a big fan of women sci-fi writers and women as take charge heroes. I am also over 50 and love it when the characters are mature. But it took forever to get into this book. It was very slow and even boring at times, which is weird because there were so many things going on. I had a hard time focusing on who the characters were and what their relationships were to each other...many of them have more than one alias and AI personalities in virtual games. The flashbacks and recalls of 35 years make it even more confusing as they are in no particular order. It took too long for the story to come together. When I reached the end of the book and realized it was the first of a series I was angry as I was ready for a conclusion and felt that I had been tricked. Hammered is like those manga novels my daughter reads that stop with a shocking clifthanger that is resolved in the next volume which also stops with a shocking clifthanger. I was even upset about the name of the book, we did not even get to the bottom of the drug "Hammer" mystery in part one of this novel.

I like the hero, Jenny, and I will read the next book just to see what happens to her. Plus, I love sci-fi exploration and first contact stories and I hope this is where Bear is going with this saga now that they are capable of long distance space flight and FTL communication. I am not as enamored with the other characters or their motives, maybe the second book will develop the people and the politics better.

Better than Hammered, I recommend Primary Inversion by Catherine Asaro. The hero is a 50ish woman who made the choice at 20 to accept into her body cyborg-like enhancements and become a pilot/warrior. Throughout her life (and the series)she struggles with the impact of that decision. I thought of Jenny as another variation on Primary Inversion's Soz.

It'd been awhile since I'd used my limited leisure reading time for science fiction, but Elizabeth Bear makes me glad I took the chance. _Hammered_ is an engaging romp that stays true to genre tradition without pillaging and reshaping it into a tepid Heinlen or Hubbard clone.

Bear's finest triumph (in this reader's opinion) is the way she creates a woman-as-protagonist without allowing Jenny's "femaleness" to be the sole defining point of importance. Not since Metroid Prime has a character been so thoroughly yet incidentally feminine. It's hard to believe, I know -- but there are billions of us who live every single day as a woman, and who do not find this state to be a point of novelty; so do not dismiss _Hammered_ for using this point-of-view character for the sake of gimmick.

Jenny Casey is tough without being cold, and vulnerable without being weak. Like the future world and the book she inhabits, she is complex but not inaccessibly complicated -- and I could most heartily recommend this story to genre fans and tentative readers alike.

Excellent stuff.

Jenny Casey is in her 50's. An ex-soldier who has cybernetic replacements, brain implants for enhanced combat reflexes, and who is recovering from addiction to various military drugs. She is a Canadian Master Warrant Officer who has seen enough combat in UN peacekeeping missions. His cybernetic organs have started to show symptoms of erratic behavior and she soon needs expert help. Her friends, a local gang lord Razorface and a police officer Mitch, are the safety net that keeps her anonymous. But she is located by her former commander who promises to upgrade everything; for a price. She is badly needed in a secret joint government-corporate project, but not everything is as what it seems.

This is not the typical cyborg soldier story. The life of Jenny is very realistic right from the opening of the book. The drugs, the gang, the street hustling, the lords are what make the city go running. She slips into the shadows and likes to keep things that way. But a corporate has hired an assassin, her sister Barbara to flush her out. Nightmares, degrading implants, military drugs fragment and dilute the surrounding of this world. Mitch the cop eventually team up with gangster lord Razorface to find out who is delivering Hammer drug (the name of the book) that is killing the people. The alien starship technology at Earth's orbit ends the book. Not exactly on edge, but that keeps a reader anticipating the continuation in book Scardown.

Two (2) stars. Written in 2004 this is book 1 in a trilogy. It won Locus Magazine's annual readers' poll Award for Best First Novel in 2006. What sticks under fingernails is the extremely short chapters that are littered with detailed time stamps and places that have no meaning to reader. The constant viewpoint shifts from character to character will require loads of concentration especially when dialogue flows without enought stops to cue the reader. The use of french is so-and-so. An understandable decision as everything happens in Canada but it feels intended to a special clique of audience. Majority of the readers may not find it justified enough to be essential to the story. The characters are not the typical stock-of-the-mill but very vivid and down to the earth. Perhaps too much so that following all these positively flawed persons' motives is hard to decipher from terse dialogue used. The story is about the people and their tough choices in this corrupted world. The military angle, the corporate tendrils and the Canadian-Chinese space race are somewhat absent. Noirish would be the atmosphere to describe this urban society and its surrounding. Not much science fiction per se, but more like realistic doomsday society. Interesting and unorthodox. Like eating odd dish serving that confuses your sense of taste.

Having read and enjoyed short stories by Elizabeth Bear, I decided to check out her well-reviewed first novel. As others have observed, the novel begins with a cyberpunk trope: the government creates, uses, and eventually discards a cyborg soldier. Though initially unsuited to civilian life, the solider learns how to bury the painful past and survive on the margins of society. In Bear's book, this solider is a 50-ish woman, Canadian, and a French-speaker of Native Canadian heritage. She's also laying low in a ghetto neighborhood in Hartford, CT, where she's a sort of neighborhood elder. When she gets the news that kids are turning up dead due to some new drug that's hit the streets, and when she realizes that the drug is "the hammer", a stimulant designed for wired soldiers like herself, she has to investigate. This inevitably brings her back to the shadowiest corner of the military-industrial complex, a place she thought she had left behind years ago.

This being a first novel, we would expect Bear to develop this fairly straightforward set-up in a fairly straightforward way. Nope. Bear has to go Jackson Pollock on us, splattering the pages with barely connected bits of story. HAMMERED may begin as a fairly routine noirish tale about revisiting a walled-off past in order to save one's friends in the present, but it morphs into a story about a psychopathic assassin sister, a ruthless colonel, rogue AIs, geopolitical competition between Canada and China, and alien starships. The jump from Female Rambo in Hartford to Canada Seeks Extrasolar Colony Using Alien Tech is bizarre and jarring.

If you decide to read HAMMERED, be prepared for two more books (SCARDOWN and WORLDWIRED) of bizarre shifts in point of view, arbitrary and inexplicable plot developments, long passages in French (not a problem if you're a speaker), and, especially in WORLDWIRED, frustration, perplexity, and boredom. I've now read five of Bear's novels, and the more I read, the less I like her as an author. Caveat emptor.

The astonishingly productive Bear (Carnival, Undertow, Promethean Age Series, New Amsterdam, many short stories) is a new discovery to me. This, her first novel, has much to commend it, and seems to be suffering surprising assaults from reviewers here. I have seen plenty of books which seem to be better reviewed than they deserve (how easy it is to get your buddies to review your book positively), but this is the first time a book seems to me to be under-reviewed on Amazon.

I would specifically take issue with criticisms that the book is confusing, each shift in time is clearly delineated with a slug line at the top of the passage, and only Jenny Casey speaks from the first person, another convention that aids understanding. Also, the view that the book does not resolve anything is wide of the mark - key plot points are resolved (can't say which ones, for fear of spoilers), there are one or more departures, and there is character development for those who are left. The most ludicrous criticism is that the book is reliant on pre-publication reviews. Usually these are completely worthless (and I would not have bought the book without consulting the positive post-pub reviews of Hammered shown on Bear's subsequent books) but the odd time they are right (twice a day like the stuck clock), and this is one of those times. Also, the thought of Richard Morgan finishing counting his multimillion dollar movie advance, and then plotting his world domination off the back of a return review from the (then-unknown) Elizabeth Bear is likely to remain a figment of Randall Tone's imagination.

Jenny Casey is a fun, interesting heroine and I look forward to reading the other two. Also, with her and Rodney McKay both flying the Canadian flag, it looks like those Canucks are taking over eh.

I adore discovering a new author and reading their first book. These first books are inventive, carefully written, and unique. Mrs. Bear's first book is all of that and more, and I'm delighted to see that she has more coming.

"Hammered" is a pure Science Fiction novel that takes place in Canada & USA, a few decades in the future. Probably the most important changes between now and then is a general "I don't care" attitude -- the ideals of freedom, liberty, and charity have all pretty much disappeared. Big business moved into the void and now control governmental functions with a rather "benign neglect" attitude -- they won't help anyone, but won't go out of their way to hurt anyone, either. Everyone complains, but they don't care enough to actually do anything.

The plotline is fragmented and thus difficult to describe. The back cover takes the easy way out of describing one of the 5 or 6 plotlines and claiming that is the focus of the book. It isn't. That plotline follows a middle aged, retired soldier. Early in her military career, she lost limbs and vital organs in an explosion, and had them replaced with cybernetic parts. She has adapted better than most to these cybernetic parts, which is to say that she keeps her drug adictions to a minimum. Her boyfriend is a tough gang leader with sharp metalic teeth. Another plotline follows a middle aged researcher who was in jail for decades for mysterious reasons. Another plotline follows a terminally ill single dad and his two teenaged daughters.

About the first third of "Hammered" is devoted to introducing these and other characters. At this point, nothing has really happened yet, and the separate point-of-view plotlines don't appear to have anything in common. Looking back at the book, all I can really say is that "Hammered" mainly explores this future world. Be warned, "Hammered" is not a stand alone book! The plotlines do not draw to a conclusion at the end of the novel, do not even climax, but rather are still building. The sequel is being published, so no worries there.

There are many readers out there who enjoy this writing style -- multiple viewpoints & multiple books -- and to you I warmly recommend "Hammered" as perhaps a 5-star book. For myself and others who abhor this style, this is an enjoyable peek into an inventive futuristic world.

What I loved about this book was the ruggedness of the main character, an older, grizzled, in-pain, cranky, ex-military woman who takes no crap from anybody. The life she's built for herself is unbelievably hard, and her moral choices are amazing.
I plan to read more works by this author once I recover.

Soldier has Ghost In the Machine.


Jenny Casey is an ex-soldier whose replacement parts aren't quite of the six million dollar variety. She also has a problem with kids dying locally thanks to getting their hands on military grade combat drugs.

This is where we meet her, but druglord arsekicking is not really on the agenda here. Canada is doing a bit of the hold the balance for the planet act after the USA has imploded (and Richard Morgan has used this device in his recent Black Man, where fundamenetalist whackos have made a huge mess of it when trying to take over and run things).

Old superiors offer Jenny an upgrade if she agrees to help them out with a project. Hard to refuse, as it basically involves stopping her dying shortly. Starships and the artifical intelligence version of Richard Feynman lie in her future.

Bear has a solid story, and even though she seems to have dumped all the hot topics and buzzwords from recent sci-fi into this story, she does get them aligned in a logical and coherent whole. The downfall is the occasionally leaden dialog. Some lines I can buy. Others, well... you honestly have to wonder if any of her editors, teachers, early readers, anyone, ever bothered to tell her she should read dialog out loud (interesting, when you read her description of herself on Amazon). And that's my main gripe. Luckily, the story was good enough for me to overlook the stretches of poor writing. I was thinking a 3-star rating, but the second book is a bit better, so I gave her 4.

I think one of the reasons I enjoyed it is because Casey and her story remind me of the days when I discovered William Gibson. The down and dirty street life Casey and Razorface have, the seedy and decrepit future-tech, the assassins for hire, the reject from the good life trying to do the right thing despite circumstances, etc. all remind me of early Gibson in a good way.