Hull Zero Three

I read this a while back, and I'm behind on saying anything about it . So sue me. Basically, I need to take a break from Greg Bear. That's not a complaint, by the way. This book was actually way better than Vitals and I think Greg Bear is a good writer. If anything, Eon and Eternity were so good that my expectations were too high when I went on to read more of his books (those were not the first books of his that I read, but they were the best ones).

Hull Zero Three is a sort of mystery story set aboard a giant ship floating in space. The narrator experiences arriving at the ship's destination planet, where he is one of the colonists that was preserved for the long voyage—and then he wakes up from his dream and he is on some sort of nightmare ship filled with killer monsters and he has no idea what is going on. Greg Bear has a tendency, which I first noticed with "Prufax" and that is conspicuously absent in his best stories, of delivering exposition in a way that is vague and that does give the reader details, but not in a way that creates a gripping story ("Prufax" is the longest and by far the worst story in The Wind From a Burning Woman and, if I remember correctly, it also received some awards and was critically acclaimed). Hull Zero Three does suffer from that problem a bit, but ultimately recovers. I stumbled across Eon and now I've come to the conclusion that Greg Bear is a prolific writer that puts out material worthy of publication, but that does, under the right circumstances, write truly great books. I wasn't disappointed, but I wasn't particularly impressed either, and I have decided that I need a break.