Worldwired (Mass Market Paperback)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: starship dreaming, habitation wheel, interface plate, Montreal Earth, Premier Xiong, Prime Minister (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Give Canada’s Master Warrant Officer Jenny Casey an inch and she’ll take a galaxy. That’s just the kind of person a world on the brink of destruction needs. The year is 2063, and Earth has been brutalized. An asteroid flung at Toronto by the PanChinese government has killed tens of millions and left the equivalent of a nuclear explosion in its wake. Humanity must find another option....

Perched above the devastation in the starship Montreal, Jenny is still in the thick of the fray. Plugged into the worldwire, connected to a brilliant AI, her mind can be everywhere and anywhere at once. But it’s focused on the mysterious alien beings right outside her ship. Are they there to help–or destroy? With Earth a breeding ground for treason and betrayal as governments struggle to assign blame, Jenny holds the fate of humankind in her artificially reconstructed hand....

About the Author

Elizabeth Bear was born on the same say as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. This, coupled with her childhood tendency to read the dictionary for fun, has led inevitably to penury, intransigence, and the writing of speculative fiction. Her hobbies include incompetent archery, practicing guitar, and reading biographies of Elizabethan playmenders.

She is the recipient of the John W. Campbell Award for best New Writer and the author of over a dozen published or forthcoming novels, including the Locus Award-winning Jenny Casey trilogy and the Phillip K. Dick Award-nominated Carnival. A native New Englander, she spent seven years near Las Vegas, but now lives in Connecticut with a presumptuous cat.

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Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Spectra (November 29, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0553587498
• ISBN-13: 978-0553587494
• Product Dimensions: 6.7 x 3.8 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #131,067 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Smashing conclusion to trilogy, April 5, 2006

By	lb136 "lb136" (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews

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"Worldwired" goes off, yet again in new direction. The three-part saga that in the author's "Hammered" seemed to be establishing itself as a cyberpunky "band of outlaws up against globalism and the corporations," but turned into an international thriller cum space opera in "Scardown," now adds a first-contact puzzle thread to the proceedings. (And a spectacular scene at the United Nations.)

This time out Jenny Casey takes more of a supporting role (although she gets plenty of action) as Richard, the super-intelligent artificial intelligence, moves front and center here. Certainly, he is the one who keeps all the plotlines together. But Jenny herself gets plenty of chapters in which to tell her part of the story in her wisecracky first-person-present style.

The author brings back the characters who survived the first two tales, and tosses in a few more (she puts a few of the returnees essentially on hold for a while, but do not fret, because she plugs them in when they're needed again), and once again uses her jagged multiple pov style. There's plenty of action here, but you have to resist the temptation to gobble down the pages, because if you do, you won't have the time to relish Ms. Bear's fine-honed prose style.

I hope that Ms. Bear will return to this "universe" she's created, although advertisements at the back of the book would seem to indicate that in her next novel she intends to go in another direction. No matter. I'll travel that road with her.

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fabulous wrap up of this three-book story arc, December 29, 2005

By	C. Cameron (Vancouver, Canada) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Watching Jenny grow and change from "Maker" in the first book, to a starship pilot in the second, to a complicated 50 year old combat veteran and reluctant hero in this book has been a fascinating journey. Bear's characters: heroes, villains, and bystanders, are all clearly lit and sympathetic (even when you know they are on the wrong side). If you liked "Patriot Games" or "Hunt for Red October" for Jack Ryan and the rest of the characters, I think you'll like this story, too. Gritty writing with an involved plot that keeps you guessing.

It also has an AI (artificial intelligence) patterned after Richard Feynman, famous physicist and drummer and a personal hero of mine. Marvellous.

2.0 out of 5 stars Easily the weakest book in the trilogy, October 7, 2009

By	Michael Lichter (Buffalo, NY USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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Elizabeth Bear's WORLDWIRED is easily the weakest book in the trilogy she began in HAMMERED. It's hard to say exactly what makes WORLDWIRED so bad, but the book is certainly not helped by frequent changes in point of view, awkward attempts at humor, awkward attempts at romance, excessive focus on indistinguishable tertiary characters (the scientists sent to make contact with and make sense of the alien spacecraft orbiting Earth), and the author's success in making alien first contact seem pointless and boring. Highlights of the book--it does have some--include the Chinese conscientious objector Min-xue (though he was more central and more interesting in SCARDOWN), the political by-play between the Canadian prime minister (who comes across more like a sweet innocent than a veteran pol) and the Chinese prime minister, the budding friendship between Genie and Patty, and the climactic shootout at the UN.

The plot, in very broad strokes, is as follows: When the Chinese dropped an asteroid on Toronto, obliterating Lake Ontario and my home town of Buffalo in the process, they created a nuclear winterish situation that Richard the AI is trying to fix using the alien nanotech that Leah Castaign dropped in the ocean while sacrificing her life. Jenny Casey is in space fighting off Chinese attempts to hack her spaceship and attempting to make contact with the aliens who recently arrived. Communication proves impossible until she and her scientist friends defy orders and land on the two ships. They quickly learn that the aliens are at least as different from each other as they are from us. Meanwhile, down on planet Earth, the Chinese sabotage Richard -- obviously hellbent on preventing anybody from cleaning up the mess they've made. The Canadian prime minister attempts to keep the military general apparently behind all of the destruction from taking over the Chinese government, an effort that comes to a head in a meeting at the UN. And that's pretty much it.

My recommendation is to stay away from this series and stay away from Bear's novels. If you've already read SCARDOWN, however, you might as well tackle this one, too. If you start with really low expectations, you won't be too disappointed.