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Hull Zero Three
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Hull Zero Three
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Hull Zero Three
Audiobook8 hours

Hull Zero Three

Written by Greg Bear

Narrated by Dan John Miller

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

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Currently unavailable

Currently unavailable

About this audiobook

A starship hurtles through the emptiness of space. Its destination — unknown. Its purpose — a mystery.

Now, one man wakes up. Ripped from a dream of a new home — a new planet and the woman he was meant to love in his arms — he finds himself wet, naked, and freezing to death. The dark halls are full of monsters but trusting other survivors he meets might be the greater danger.

All he has are questions — Who is he? Where are they going? What happened to the dream of a new life? What happened to Hull Zero Three?

All will be answered, if he can survive the ship.

Hull Zero Three is an edge-of-your-seat thriller set in the darkest reaches of space.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateNov 22, 2010
ISBN9781441886798
Unavailable
Hull Zero Three
Author

Greg Bear

Greg Bear was born in San Diego, California. His father was in the US Navy, and by the time he was twelve years old, Greg had lived in Japan, the Philippines, Alaska – where at the age of ten he completed his first short story – and various other parts of the US. He published his first science fiction story aged sixteen. His novels and stories have won prizes and been translated around the world.

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Reviews for Hull Zero Three

Rating: 3.3134110460641404 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

343 ratings28 reviews

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  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    It took me a while to get round to finishing Hull Zero Three, but it's not a difficult book at all. It's easy to read, despite the ethical questions it brings up; it's not hard SF, really, it's low on technical details. Mostly Greg Bear gives you a sort of survival-horror world, which you come to realise is a version of the generation-ship idea, and then poses a problem unique to this particular ship that they have to work through. Because the main character has a sort of amnesia, all of this is revealed slowly -- which is a pretty clever way to do it, because obviously the reader is in the same position as the narrator.Ultimately, Hull Zero Three didn't really get its claws into me -- there wasn't enough to make it stand out. But it is a fun read, and an interesting one.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The book had a bit of clunky, overly descriptive writing. It was also almost incomprehensible for most of its length, but that was somewhat deliberate — everything does get explained in the end. Once I read the final 50 pages and understood what had been happening, I found I actually liked the preceeding 250 pages more than I had.Some of the side characters were memorable, and there were some very cool sci-fi ideas and some scary biological horrors. I'd give this 3 and a half stars if Goodreads allowed half stars.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    About time there was a good sci/fi book that didn't require the need of a science degree to read and didn't run off into a fantasy world.Good plot, good characters, written to carry you from the first page to the last.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    One of those books that is not that easy for me to understand. And it was hard to keep up with all the different creatures the author invented for the story. But it was interesting and I liked it.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Wow. One of those "out there" type of stories. A blank-slate character in a confused, crazy, deadly world.

    So, the protagonist awakes from what appears to be a cryo-sleep chamber. Apparently a crew member of an expedition sent from Earth, to allow humanity to reach the stars. Maybe. But his memory is choppy, uncertain... confused. He's saved by a little girl, who isn't forthcoming with any further details. He's on a spaceship, but not where he "should" be; not with whom he should be.

    Nothing is as it should be. Something is wrong. People are dying or dead. Monsters roam the halls of the spaceship. Impossible monsters. And the first task is to run. Run from the monsters, run from the cold as the ship freezes, run for the heat that always seems to be moving away, farther along the ship.

    All he knows, all he's told, is that he is "Teacher". A teacher who knows nothing. Or, at least, who only learns to doubt what he does know. And to fear everything.

    A meditation on the existential crisis? Who are we? Who am I? What is my purpose? Where are we? Why this, that, and everything else?

    I quite enjoyed this. The puzzle, the answers, the answers that only lead to deeper questions... and a final resolution that is satisfying and right.

    This is science fiction, set in the future, but as relevant and meaningful as a contemporary war story. Bravo, Mr. Bear!

  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Another good book from Greg
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    One of the worst books I've actually finished in a long time, always hoping it would get better. Just nothing to recommend really...
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    A good read. Mixture of survival horror, science fiction and a story that kept me reading.
    While I don't think this is the best book I've read it does make me want to try more Greg Bear.
    Worth a go!
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Alright. Wish I had got it on my Nook, and not a proper book.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    It was okay. I've liked Greg Bears earlier stuff much better. This had a kind of "Rendezvous with Rama" feel to it, only everyone was supposed to be in the ship. Had a hopeless feeling throughout the book, which is rather depressing.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Disappointing. It seemed exactly like a mid-range American SF short novel from the 1960's, the kind no one remembers, and only people like me with large libraries read these days. Characteristics of that period and this book include flat characters (past the gosh golly days of the 30's but not yet the mature characterization we expect now), emphasis on plot and a single thematic idea to the exclusion of everything else, and a really tough row to hoe for the main character. The plot mixes Ellison's I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, with Budry's Rogue Moon, and others, no doubt. Perhaps this was Bear's homage to the 60's. Definitely a lesser effort.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I like Greg Bear as an author. I enjoy Science Fiction. I like stories about quests for self discovery. Somehow, in Hull Zero Three, this added up to an almost losing combination. I'm still trying to figure out why I stayed with this book. Maybe, I was hoping it would get better, but it never rises above mediocrity. I going to give this a mushy three star rating; if I think about it too long, I might downgrade the rating.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I had seen a few reviews of this book before I checked it out of the library, and while the concept sounded interesting, some of the criticisms of the way the book was put together made me a little hesitant at first. The protagonist is plunged in medias res right from the beginning, and in a way he never really catches up with the situation quite to my satisfaction by the end. He is the only character whose motivations and inner life are really portrayed to any great extent, also, so it was hard to feel much about the fate of the others in the band of survivor he assembles (or about their antagonists, for that matter). The idea of the generation ship and the intentions of its builders was intriguing, but I'm afraid the execution of this particular part of its story didn't quite do it for me.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I listened to the audio version narrated by Dan John Miller.This story is set on a kilometres long spaceship, on a very long journey to another hospitable world. The main protagonist is awoken from an utopian dream-time by a mysterious human like girl, into a cold unforgiving ship full of strange and deadly creatures. The girl says he's "always Teacher" and we follow Teacher as he learns who or what he is and learns to survive a ship that is constantly in "spin-down" or "spin-up", alternating between gravity and weightlessness, and chasing warmth, as parts of the ship seem to have lost life-support.I enjoyed this story of survival, space flight, strange creatures. Also the themes of space exploration in a possibility inhabited universe, how can we ethically colonise another planet, should we?
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    _Hull Zero Three_ is a pretty solid 3-star sci-fi story. It’s my first read of anything by Greg Bear, and while I wasn’t exactly blown away I’ll keep my eye out for other stuff by him in the future. The novel follows the first person account of a newly awakened passenger on a seedship headed towards a destination as yet unknown. The sequence that opens the novel followed by the disorienting waking of the passenger is well done and immediately immerses the reader into the dangerous world of Ship.

    The majority of the novel plays out as a kind of scientific mystery tinged with horror as the newly awakened crewman, soon dubbed “Teacher” by his saviour, is immediately thrust into a race to find out not only the purpose of the huge ship he has found himself aboard, but the reason for why everything seems to have gone so horribly wrong. As Teacher and his growing group of companions race across the giant hull in an attempt to “follow heat” and live with a constant spin up and spin down of gravity to which they must become accustomed, they also have to avoid the Factors, giant creatures created by Ship to keep things in order…unfortunately that apparently also means terminating any human strays they find in the myriad passageways and compartments that make up the vast environment.

    I personally thought that Bear let the survival elements of the story play out a bit too long. The final mystery as to what happened to Ship to place it in its current predicament was interesting and had a lot of potential...unfortunately the conclusion reached by Teacher as to the agency behind Ship’s difficulties, though very intriguing, seemed to come out of nowhere given the relatively sparse build-up given to the clues that led to his intuitive leap. I thought more fleshing out of that aspect of the story and a little less emphasis on the survival part would have been an advantage. Overall a fun read, though not earth-shattering by any means.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    First contemporary hard scifi I've read a while. Good gripping stuff, and the concepts fascinate me - rehashed as some of them were, the writing style made up for it. I'll have to look up this author's stuff in the future.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I can say I really liked this story by Greg Bear, although - as others have already mentioned - it is not the most original. In fact as I was reading it I thought that it could describe what would happen on a Rama ship if everything went nuts. Nevertheless, as far as I am concerned, he really got the hard sci-fi part right. All the science is not just plausible but also very interesting and quite thought-provoking. To his credit, everything is also explained and everything fits within the grander scheme.

    The fight for survival part is also well executed. As a reader you really feel for the confused hero who can't even remember his name, but is thrown into a hellish environment that he's not really prepared for. In some respects, the beginning parallels the beginning of the movie Pandorum but they quickly part ways. Nothing is ever safe and conditions change rapidly from hospitable to deadly and back. The other major problem is that noone has the answers or all the pertinent information on what is going(even the Ship has had large parts of its databanks lost). Knowledge gathering is just as important as surviving - perhaps for some even more so. Unfortunately, the latter is not explored so much.

    My main problem with the book, and it is not a major problem, is of the endless descriptions of the rooms and areas that were traversed by the characters, especially in the first part. Maybe it is a limitation of my English or of my imagination, but it felt like the author was trying to convey important information with all this detail and I couldn't quite get it. After a point I just gave up and pictured it my way... A lesser frustration was that the Teacher and the other characters were taking too long to remember/regain their knowledge.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This story has more of the strength and structure of a short story or novella then a full length book. It has the pop of a great sci-fi short story, but that's all it has going for it. In a way, this story combines every sci-fi cliche in the book. It is 2001, the Matrix, Moon, and even a little bit from the thriller Before I Go to Sleep. A man is part of a mission to cultivate a planet. A peaceful dream shows what is to be done, the excitement of a new planet, only to be violently awakened similar something from the Matrix. He doesn't know who he is or what happened, but he needs to figure it out quick before he is torn to pieces.The fact that the main character know nothing at first is both exhilarating and irritating. It is difficult to pull the pieces together if the person can barely articulate what is going on. I thought the secret of the ship was a nice punch, but there just isn't enough around it to make it a good story.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I had not read any of Greg Bear's extensive oeuvre before picking up Hull Zero Three to read as part of the 2012 Sci-Fi challenge at Curiosity Killed the Bookworm. What I discovered while reading this book was a thought-provoking and challenging novel by a multiple award-winning SF author. Although the novel employs many classic tropes – the deep space mission gone awry, consciousness spawned and run amok, humanity’s struggle with survival and destruction – conceptually, Hull Zero Three paints an ambitious picture of space exploration in the distant future. In overall form it is more a mystery than an actual hard, groundbreaking SF novel, and even if the themes and ideas are familiar the conundrums that emanate from Bear’s storytelling skill make the book a worthwhile, if en petite abstruse, read. Bear presents classic familiar questions in the science fiction realm, contrasting humanity and individuality--dream versus reality through the lens of genetic manipulation, and examines the future of a primitive and destructive humankind among the stars. In some, slight way the book reminded me of other Science Fiction that I have enjoyed like James Blish's Cities in Flight and A. E. Van Vogt's The Voyage of the Space Beagle. Bear’s novel is certainly more sophisticated than the latter and incredibly subtle with powerful concepts that provoke reflection. I enjoyed Hull Zero Three for the most part and found the conclusion especially satisfying. There are a few aspects of the book that I found disappointing in light of the overall success. The presentation of the mystery, as narrated by Teacher, the main character in the book is slow to develop. While the reader can enjoy the discovery of clues as to the nature of the ship that is Teacher's home, the difficulty in putting the pieces together detracts from the overall presentation of the story. Hull Zero Three is written with a great expanse of detail, but in a strange way the descriptions and style are often confusing and intangible; the characters and even Ship (note the capitalization and lack of a definite article) itself are hard to visualize. For example, monkey-like creatures are described as donuts, one character can rearrange her bulk and shape by somehow shifting sinew and muscle. Teacher is prone to confused visualizations as he tries to reform his new lexicon from deep sleep. He discovers new words he didn’t know existed, unlocking memories for each item and creature he encounters the longer he is awake, and this initial use of language, the importance of books and the actual format of Hull Zero Three – itself as a written book by Teacher – is very clever and comes together nicely by the end of the book…but the overall effect is somewhat piecemeal. I grew impatient at times with the stylistic details of the novel and from the lack of actual, meaty character development – there are some scenes of self-reflection, but without any real depth or heft. Hull Zero Three is more about the mystery and solving the puzzle than it is about realization of character arcs – which isn’t to say that Teacher’s struggle isn’t a valid or engaging one! It certainly is. But Hull‘s strengths lie elsewhere – namely, in that of its overall concept and design.That Bear is able to overcome some of these issues and bring the story together brilliantly by the end of the novel while resolving questions raised by the mysteries of Ship, the resolution felt somewhat subitaneous. To much telling in the wrapping up marred the excellent space adventure but did not keep me from considering more Greg Bear for my future and recommending this particular novel for your future.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Interesting story, but there was something missing.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I loved how the book began, it was so frightening and surreal, the mystery kept unfolding as the people/creatures made their way out of the horrible accident that occured somewhere along a journey to colonize another world. There is some frightening and wierd stuff in here, and in the end, I'm not sure I got all of it. The science is so far advanced as to seem utterly fantastic and chaotic, and the characters subject to the limitless capabilities of the ship's powers that actually unravelling what happened is very difficult. That may contribute to why the ending didn't have the satisfaction I had hoped--it was an ending set so deeply into a mix of scientific possibility that I was not able to relate with it comfortably, and so I lost my grasp on it. Perhaps if I had a mind more open I would have been ready for it.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I was a little slow to warm to Greg Bear's latest novel Hull Zero Three, but once I did I really enjoyed it and found it an above average hard science fiction novel. There are a couple of good reviews on Library Thing that capture my thoughts on the book better than I could, especially the one by beserene dated jan 6, 2011. I really like a book that can pull me into another world, one where once you set the book down that world is still alive within your mind. The ending was rather unexpected for me, and not entirely satisfactory as it left the adventure of the novel almost incomplete. It was in truth a good ending however, and I have to rate this in the above average category as it really gripped me a number of times. recommended.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Inventive hard sci-fi. The Ship is an interesting creation, and the characters were fun, but I was kind of left wondering what the point of the whole thing was. Bear's other books are better by far, especially Blood Music, Queen of Angels, or Heads.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I was going to call this a "love it or hate it" book, but then as I've given it 3.5 stars maybe I'm somewhere in between. As Sci-Fi goes It certainly ranks as good, inventive, original and unpredictable, with an accessible narrative that doesn't attempt to lecture nor requires a degree in astrophysics to understand. It kept me turning the pages until the end without any regrets at having started.And yet somehow I don't love it. Maybe it's because, rather than stirring me to love or even loathe "Teacher", the main protagonist, I was left simply with a mild and rather irrational dislike of him. Or maybe it's because the mystery of the plot, which was gripping throughout, rather fails at the end to live up to the expectation that has been set.Nevertheless, well worth a read for SF fans.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I'm a sucker for this type of book, ever since I read" Orphans of the Sky" by RAH. A long interstellar trip gone bad. But this one was long and drawn out. I got tired of reading chase scenes and "who am I?" passages. As one reviewer I read somewhere said it would make a good short story. Not that the premise wasn't good, just the story didn't seem to be going anywhere while I was reading it. Couldn't find any sympathetic characters.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This novel, released in November 2010 and received by me as an ARC, is serious science fiction. It's not a subgenre -- not space opera, not *punk -- but true science fiction, with astrophysics, "aliens" (so to speak), conflict... in short all the ingredients of a classic science fiction plot. It is also complex, sometimes confusing, and occasionally downright creepy. I quite liked it.The novel is written in first person from the perspective of an individual usually referred to as "Teacher" -- Bear plays with the irony of that title throughout the novel, starting from page three, because Teacher begins the novel as ignorant as the reader, and progresses slowly toward a knowledge of who/what/where/why he is. The reader follows that journey, through a hostile environment in a damaged spaceship, where nearly everything is trying to kill nearly everything else. The reader is often as confused as Teacher is, but the small steps toward the resolution of the ship's mystery keep one turning pages.The environment of the ship itself is eerily evoked through Bear's descriptions. We see this world through Teacher's eyes, including as his memory awakens, so things for which the reader might have a ready word or comparison are sometimes described in new, alien terms or with a sense of rediscovery. Most of the time, this works to enhance the sense of eerie otherness that the novel is building -- occasionally Teacher's "hey, I remembered a new word!" moments are a little annoying, but that is generally outweighed by some of the sly allusions that Bear uses Teacher's wakening memory to make. References to literature (including Carroll's 'The Hunting of the Snark', unless I am way off) and scientific knowledge abound.The characters that Teacher meets along the way are puzzles unto themselves, and the reader could easily spend plenty of time considering their particular evolution. Bear has put a great deal of thought and craftsmanship into the logical pattern of development for the ship, its inhabitants, and how they all fit into the mysterious circumstances he has created. There is a lot of crafty build-up in this novel, to the point that the final chapters seem to fly by as the pieces of the larger puzzle start to come together. The end, which of course I will not reveal here, is perhaps not as mindblowing as one might expect from that build-up, but still works in the grand scheme of the book.Bottom line: If you are a fan of science fiction in its purest form, this is the book for you. It has all the ingredients -- a tight plot, suspense, science, space travel, strange beings, even a healthy dollop of blood and gore -- that made classic sci-fi great. Warning: it also contains a touch of the surreal (as the allusion to Carroll would testify), so don't expect simplicity here.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I was intrigued after hearing Greg Bear interviewed on the Starship Sofa podcast, and happened to have a 50% off coupon for Borders books, so I picked it up. Although it was strange in places, I mostly found this book quite captivating and difficult to put down.It's mainly a trip through a generation ship gone wrong. The main character wakes up expecting to be at their destination but finds himself immediately running for his life from monsters and chasing warmth. Things only seem to get more mysterious as he meets a few more people as they try to make their way forward to find answers, but instead find themselves caught up in a war they barely understand.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This is the story about a slower than light sleeper colony ship sent from Earth at tremendous expense during what was thought to quite possibly the end-times of our home world. Its told from the point of view of a "teacher". A humanoid based on a real person, one of the key people of the colonizing effort. He has troubling memories of his life on Earth, but they are distorted and cannot be trusted. Nothing can be trusted. He awakens in a bizarre nightmare world that humans were never meant to be quickened into. Something has gone terribly wrong. The ship and its computers and memory stores are badly damaged. Dire decisions have been made and warring factions result. Behind all this is a moral dilemma, a brutal test, that I think we as we are would probably fail. There is more going on than meets the eye on Ship.All in all I liked the story. However, I would like to see it reworked. The beings are often bizzare to the point of being Dali-esque or Jim Henson-esque may be a better word. The writing in general could be tightened up and many questions are left open, but not in a skillful way. Seriously, this could be a major work of SF if it were re-done. Even so, the story lingers with me and I suspect will enter my dreams.