Entertaining the Alien

26. Hammered, Elizabeth Bear

I'm a little ashamed that it took me this long to get a copy of this book and read it. I got to hear the author read a bit from it at WorldCon in September, and got really excited to read the rest. It wasn't until WisCon that I actually bought it and started reading. In the interest of full disclosure, I should probably note that I've met the author a couple of times and follow her livejournal regularly.

That said... wow. Usually anything even vaguely cyberpunky leaves me cold, mostly because emotions are not the focus of the genre, and it's hard to care about a lot of the characters. There have been two exceptions to this: Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, and now Hammered. Jenny Casey may be one of my new favorite SF/F characters. She's unabashedly tough and independent without turning into a man with boobs, like so many tough, independent women in fiction.

It was interesting that I found myself reading this on two levels, as a reader, and as a writer. I do that fairly often nowadays, but maybe because I read about Bear's process as a writer, I was more aware of it here. I was able to see how things worked, and why they worked, while at the same time, as a reader, feeling the effects that the author no doubt meant for me to feel. It was impressive as hell. I don't think I will wait nearly as long to get my hands on the follow up, Scardown, which comes out at the end of the month.