A quest against the longest odds

kw: book reviews, science fiction, space fiction, starships, video games

Consider a video game with just a few levels. You have no weapons, you don't know the rules of play, you begin with only one ally whom you have no reason to trust, and you soon realize everything else out there is trying to kill you. You've just awakened from an idyllic dream to a nightmare: you're naked, freezing, hungry and thirsty. You have to find your way somewhere, you aren't sure where; you will gain a few useful allies and avoid a host of enemies; you must find food and water that won't poison you; you realize you are on a damaged starship; and you hope to find out why and what and all the other questions any good reporter asks. You don't know your own name.

This is how Hull Zero Three by Greg Bear begins. It takes about a quarter of the book to set the stage to the point detailed above. The book really does read much like I'd expect a narrative of a questing video game. Before there were video games, we played a text version of "Adventure", on mainframe computers, using text terminals. The computer would write,

You are in a long hallway with closed doors along both sides. It recedes as far as the eye can see in either direction. The fifth door on the left appears open and lighted. Do you want to go forward or turn around and go the other way?

Depending on how smart the program was, you might answer "Go forward and enter the lighted doorway". Then it would tell you what you see now. And so forth… Adventure was hugely popular until it was replaced by Doom and similar games with a more visual interface.

The starship of Hull Zero Three is an intriguing design. Its fuel and water supply is a comet several kilometers in size, harvested from the Oort Cloud. Technologies we haven't yet discovered are behind the "diverter" (a shield against cosmic dust and debris), freezing and revivifying apparatus, cloning from an artificial DNA library, and the "bosonic drive". I must assume the drive has a specific impulse of about a million seconds for the craft to attain a speed of 0.2c while using only half its fuel.

Note: Specific Impulse is the number of seconds a rocket engine can produce one pound of force using one pound of fuel (or 9.8 Newtons using one kilogram of fuel). The best launch rockets currently in use have SI of around 500 seconds, and the best ion engines for off-earth use approach 8,000 seconds.

Back to the starship. It has three hulls, imaginatively named 01, 02, and 03. The protagonist, called the Teacher throughout, even after he is given a name, is awakened in 01, finds his way forward to some kind of control center, and gains a few allies along the way. They stretch the definition of human, but it seems they all are. They find a shuttle craft that takes them to 03, where additional allies await, but so does possible doom for Teacher. He has, at this point, found out that he has been cloned many times; he has seen rooms full of corpses identical to him. It was at this point that I began to think of the book's plot as a video game, because you get so many "lives" in video games.

In Adventure, there were no extra lives. When you died, the game was over. You could restart it, but you had to go from the beginning; no restarting from a "save point". In the book, I suppose it is somewhat like that, because this incarnation of Teacher starts from the birthing chamber just like all his earlier selves. He finds that he's been trying, and failing, for hundreds of years, after some kind of conflict, perhaps a civil war on shipboard.

The ship's hulls themselves are enigmatic. Apparently they reconfigure using some kind of shapeshifting technology similar to what we saw with the "liquid robot" in Terminator 2. I wonder, even if such a technology is possible, whether it'll ever be cost-effective outside certain very narrow applications. Many neat technologies were commercial failures. Nonetheless, the changing landscape adds to the challenges Teacher must face, the tests he must "pass", to make certain the ship is able to continue and complete its mission. In the end, his key asset is his conscience.

I like a book that keeps me thinking. Hull Zero Three is full of interesting ideas, has a compelling narrative, and was an entertaining read.