Grail - Elizabeth Bear [1]
—RICHARD MORGAN, author of Altered Carbon
“Hammered has it all. Drug wars, hired guns, corporate skullduggery, and bleeding-edge AI, all rolled into one of the best first novels I’ve seen in I don’t know how long. This is the real dope!”
—CHRIS MORIARTY, author of Spin Control
“A glorious hybrid: hard science, dystopian geopolitics, and wide-eyed sense of wonder seamlessly blended into a single book. I hate this woman. She makes the rest of us look like amateurs.”
—PETER WATTS, author of Starfish and Maelstrom
“Bear is talented.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“Moves at warp speed, with terse ’n’ tough dialogue laced with irony, larger-than-life characters and the intrigue of a 3-D chess match. It’s a sharp critique of the military-industrial complex and geopolitics—with our normally nice neighbors to the north as the villains, to boot.… A compelling, disquieting look at a future none of us ever want to see.”
—Hartford Courant
“Bear skillfully constructs the ingredients for an exciting, futuristic, high-tech book.”
—The Dallas Morning News
“Hammered is hard-boiled, hard-hitting science fiction—but it has a very human heart. The reader will care what happens to these characters.”
—Winston-Salem Journal
“Bear posits a violent, frightening future. She doesn’t try to sugarcoat this world, [but] does a good job of balancing the bad parts with moments of humanity and goodness.… Hammered is a hard-edged, intriguing look at a near-future Earth that paints technology in some quite unique ways.”
—The Davis Enterprise
“A violent, compulsive read … [Bear is] a welcome addition—not only to ‘noir sci-fi’ but to sensational fiction in general.… Compulsively readable … Bear’s greatest talent in Hammered is writing about violence in a way that George Pelecanos, Robert Crais and the aforementioned Parker would envy.… Bear isn’t just a writer to watch, she’s a writer to applaud.”
—The Huntsville Times
“Bear’s twenty-first century has some intriguing features drawn from ongoing events … desperate and violent urban centers, artificial intelligences emerging in the Net, virtual reconstructions of famous personalities, neural augmentation, nanotech surgical bots. Bear devotes admirable attention to the physical and mental challenges that radical augmentation would likely entail, and Hammered certainly establishes Bear as a writer with intriguing potential.”
—Fantasy & Science Fiction
“With Jenny Casey, author Elizabeth Bear delivers a kick-butt fighter who could easily hold her own against Kristine Smith’s Jani Kilian or Elizabeth Moon’s Heris Serrano.… What Bear has done in Hammered is create a world that is all too plausible, one racked by environmental devastation and political chaos. Through Jenny Casey’s eyes, she conducts a tour of this society’s darker corners, offering an unnerving peek into a future humankind would be wise to avoid.”
—SciFi.com
“Hammered is a tough, gritty novel sure to appeal to fans of Elizabeth Moon and David Weber.… In Jenny Casey, Bear has created an admirably Chandler-esque character, street-smart and battle-scarred, tough talking and quick on the trigger.… Bear shuttles effortlessly back and forth across time to weave her disparate cast of characters together in a tightly plotted page-turner. The noir universe she creates is as hard-edged as the people who inhabit it.”
—SFRevu
“An SF thriller full of skullduggery, featuring a razor-sharp ex-soldier who’s on the run from her own government for fear they’ll want to do worse things to her than they already have, and they’ve done a lot … A tense, involving and character-driven read … a doozy of a ride.”
—The New York Review of Science Fiction
“A sobering projection of unchecked current social, political and environmental trends [centered around the] theme of how what we would choose to preserve and what we wish to discard are sometimes inextricable.