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Hydrogen Steel
When retired top homicide inspector Zette McGee, late of Winter City, Ganymede, gets called out of her mysterious retirement to help Kell Fallow, a desperate former android accused unjustly of murdering his wife and children, she knows she has to help him, for Zette has a secret she is desperate to keep, and Fallow knows all about it. With the help of her best friend, the elderly but very suave former secret agent Gideon Smith, and his ridiculously impressive personal starship, the Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time, Zette sets out (a) to help the accused man, but also (b) to keep Gideon from finding out her own awful secret, even as everything they learn in the investigation keeps pointing to it.
- GenresScience Fiction
384 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 2006
5 people are currently reading
38 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
September 10, 2015
I loved everything about the book except the short last section. But don't let that deter you from getting it. It reminded me of one of my very favorite books, Spin State, right from the start. It doesn't have the military aspect that book has, but it has the mystery/investigation sci-fi with a strong and interesting woman lead character. She's an ex-cop instead of a soldier. I liked Zette a lot. She was complex, tough and still vulnerable, and had a lot of interesting features to explore because of her situation. It's the old Friday question, what makes a person human, examined from a new perspective. She was a great central character.
The end was just a little disappointing. There were some big mysteries in the book that kept the tension and excitement going, I was definitely curious to find out what had happened and what would happen, and then instead of Zette uncovering them dramatically…the answers are all just given to her. There was a lot of infodumping to explain everything, suddenly wrapping up in "tell me" not "show me." It was weird, the book was going, going, going with action and excitement and emotional moments, then it just stopped at the last chapter like the author hit his word count and had to wrap it up. Or couldn't figure out how else to wrap it up. The end wasn't entirely bad, he did have a strategy for why he wrote that chapter the way he did, the plot concept that allowed Zette to find out all of the answers also allowed some interesting plot developments for her story and for her choices in the final moments. And it was a pretty terrific book up until that chapter, I'd read it again and I'd recommend it.
The end was just a little disappointing. There were some big mysteries in the book that kept the tension and excitement going, I was definitely curious to find out what had happened and what would happen, and then instead of Zette uncovering them dramatically…the answers are all just given to her. There was a lot of infodumping to explain everything, suddenly wrapping up in "tell me" not "show me." It was weird, the book was going, going, going with action and excitement and emotional moments, then it just stopped at the last chapter like the author hit his word count and had to wrap it up. Or couldn't figure out how else to wrap it up. The end wasn't entirely bad, he did have a strategy for why he wrote that chapter the way he did, the plot concept that allowed Zette to find out all of the answers also allowed some interesting plot developments for her story and for her choices in the final moments. And it was a pretty terrific book up until that chapter, I'd read it again and I'd recommend it.
July 23, 2011
A story that starts with an interesting premise that somehow ends in a disappointing anti-climax. Although our protagonist's, Zette McGee's, situation is fascinating (the idea that your life was just a virtual sham and that you're really an android), the story never seems to really run with this concept. For the most part, this is one big conspiracy theory story with Zette just along for the ride (either crying, puking, or being terrified).
March 16, 2017
what an incredible mind-bender! to start with, this seemed similar to Bedford's first novel, Orbital Burn - likeable female central character faced with a mystery she needs to solve, dealing with her own personal dramas at the same time as chasing clues and dodging bad guys. But while Orbital Burn has some clever twists, Hydrogen Steel is like one big twisty carnival ride of high-concept messing with the characters' (and the readers') minds. A great read, just make sure to strap yourself in and hang onto some sense of reality...
August 2, 2019
Interesting premise and well-written, but a real challenge to keep my suspension of disbelief going. Problems are well-outlined here,
https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-re...
I did not finish this one. Not a keeper. My first book by this author.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-re...
I did not finish this one. Not a keeper. My first book by this author.
December 26, 2019
Book #: 65
Title: Hydrogen Steel
Author: K.A. Benford
2019 Popsugar Category: Basic: A book recommended by a celebrity you admire (Robert Sawyer)
2019 Popsugar Category: Basic: A book set in space
2020 Popsugar Category: A book with a robot, cyborg, or AI character
Goodreads Category: A book related to one of the elements on the periodic table of elements
Dagonell Category: A book set in the future
Dagonell Category: A book set on a space ship
A-Z Title: H for Hydrogen
A-Z Author: B for Benford
Format: ebook, recent purchase
Rating: ** two out of five stars
As much as I like Robert Sawyer's own writings, I'm going to have to stop listening to him for recommendations. He's now batting 0 for 3. I bought the book because he recommended it and it was for sale on Kindle for $0.99.
One hundred and fifty years ago, the Earth disappeared. No one knows why or how. Humanity still exists on colony worlds and space habitats. About a dozen or so, AIs have achieved sentience and fled human space for the stars, riding the solar winds.
Zette McGee is a retired homicide investigator. She's contacted by a man named Kell Fallow who says he's being framed for the murder of his wife. When she asks why he's calling her, he says because he's a disposable like her, and they were friends in the factory before she was activated. A disposable is an artificial human being, an android with a low IQ, submission persona, and no self preservation instincts. Perfect slaves. Zette remembers having a childhood. She can't be a disposable. Intrigued, she agrees to meet with him. She's late and a bomb goes off and kills him. Had she been on time, she would have been killed too. From that point on, someone's trying their hardest to kill her. That someone is Hydrogen Steel, an AI. The Otarku, another AI, is trying to protect her at all costs, even if it means she learns 'Things Mankind Was Not Meant to Know'!
If there's such a thing as a literary record for most deus ex-machinas in a single novel, this book would hold it. Stopping time, teleportation across light years, escaping crippling injuries by waking up in a cloned body, mystic powers learned in the Far East (of Earth???), advanced abilities directly downloaded into their brains a la Matrix, answers coming in a dream, etc. This was strictly a waiting-in-line book. Don't bother.
Title: Hydrogen Steel
Author: K.A. Benford
2019 Popsugar Category: Basic: A book recommended by a celebrity you admire (Robert Sawyer)
2019 Popsugar Category: Basic: A book set in space
2020 Popsugar Category: A book with a robot, cyborg, or AI character
Goodreads Category: A book related to one of the elements on the periodic table of elements
Dagonell Category: A book set in the future
Dagonell Category: A book set on a space ship
A-Z Title: H for Hydrogen
A-Z Author: B for Benford
Format: ebook, recent purchase
Rating: ** two out of five stars
As much as I like Robert Sawyer's own writings, I'm going to have to stop listening to him for recommendations. He's now batting 0 for 3. I bought the book because he recommended it and it was for sale on Kindle for $0.99.
One hundred and fifty years ago, the Earth disappeared. No one knows why or how. Humanity still exists on colony worlds and space habitats. About a dozen or so, AIs have achieved sentience and fled human space for the stars, riding the solar winds.
Zette McGee is a retired homicide investigator. She's contacted by a man named Kell Fallow who says he's being framed for the murder of his wife. When she asks why he's calling her, he says because he's a disposable like her, and they were friends in the factory before she was activated. A disposable is an artificial human being, an android with a low IQ, submission persona, and no self preservation instincts. Perfect slaves. Zette remembers having a childhood. She can't be a disposable. Intrigued, she agrees to meet with him. She's late and a bomb goes off and kills him. Had she been on time, she would have been killed too. From that point on, someone's trying their hardest to kill her. That someone is Hydrogen Steel, an AI. The Otarku, another AI, is trying to protect her at all costs, even if it means she learns 'Things Mankind Was Not Meant to Know'!
If there's such a thing as a literary record for most deus ex-machinas in a single novel, this book would hold it. Stopping time, teleportation across light years, escaping crippling injuries by waking up in a cloned body, mystic powers learned in the Far East (of Earth???), advanced abilities directly downloaded into their brains a la Matrix, answers coming in a dream, etc. This was strictly a waiting-in-line book. Don't bother.
December 24, 2019
The ending of this book is beyond disappointing. Everything leading up to the ending is somewhat good, but overall still frustrating. Zette is talked up as a badass but never actually does anything badass. On one particularly memorable occasion, when left to 'save the day' by herself, she promptly knocks herself out and it is left to her friend to save her and the day. That's a pretty good representation of this book as a whole. Zette is flawed and overall mostly useless. The whole book feels like a sequence of things happening to her and it never feels like she does anything at all. The few times she does try to do something, she promptly fails miserably and has to be rescued. It's frankly infuriating.
Gideon, however. Well Gideon is essentially god. He's perfect. In every way. Gideon knows everything, Gideon does everything of value, Gideon is the one to save the day when Zette fails yet again. He's the heroic combination of a wet dream and a deus ex machina.
And the ending. I don't know what happened to make the author think that was a good idea. It's so far from satisfying that it ruins anything worthwhile that happened in the book previously.
Disappointment is the word that primarily comes to mind. I would not recommend this book and in fact I would warn against reading it, unless you enjoy the rug being pulled out from under you in a way that leaves you with a cracked skull rather than an exhilarating feeling of surprise.
Gideon, however. Well Gideon is essentially god. He's perfect. In every way. Gideon knows everything, Gideon does everything of value, Gideon is the one to save the day when Zette fails yet again. He's the heroic combination of a wet dream and a deus ex machina.
And the ending. I don't know what happened to make the author think that was a good idea. It's so far from satisfying that it ruins anything worthwhile that happened in the book previously.
Disappointment is the word that primarily comes to mind. I would not recommend this book and in fact I would warn against reading it, unless you enjoy the rug being pulled out from under you in a way that leaves you with a cracked skull rather than an exhilarating feeling of surprise.
November 14, 2019
When is the alien bad guy not the bad guy?
Loved this book, as the bags under my eyes testify. Great twists and some good questions on what constitutes ethics and the definition of the self. If you like science fiction served with a side order of looming human issues, I recommend this as a great read.
Loved this book, as the bags under my eyes testify. Great twists and some good questions on what constitutes ethics and the definition of the self. If you like science fiction served with a side order of looming human issues, I recommend this as a great read.
September 10, 2017
Very imaginative
I enjoyed the book very much. It was a good read with some interesting ideas. It was the second book I have read by that author, I will be reading more.
I enjoyed the book very much. It was a good read with some interesting ideas. It was the second book I have read by that author, I will be reading more.
September 4, 2020
Good characters and a strong mystery plot.
July 4, 2012
review circa 2008, reprinted from NeoOpsis #12
Bedford is an award-winning Australian author, and this is his third novel for Calgary Publisher, Brian Hades (Edge SF). If you're wondering, as I did, why an Australian has to send his novels to Canada to get published, it may be because Hydrogen Steel has something of a Canadian outlook.
Zette McGee is a hard-boiled police detective who comes out of retirement when an alleged murderer appeals to her for help. Zette takes the case because the suspect knows more about Zette's own past than she does herself, and with the help of fellow retiree Gideon, they spend then next 350 pages chasing clues and avoiding assassination to stop them from uncovering the truth.
That's not the Canadian part, though.
Bedford has created an engaging mystery that keeps the reader turning pages, set against a future filled, packed — crowded, really — with futuristic tech: nano, renegade AIs, replicants with identity crises, wormhole space travel, alien monitors (mostly offstage), skyhooks, terraforming, and brain upgrades — the lot. Aging SF readers like myself might find it all a little too familiar and superficial, but younger readers are likely to be blown away by this rapid-fire assault of the next 'big idea'.
And to his credit, Bedford manages to avoid the worst excesses of expository lump, only occasionally pausing the story to explain this or that technology, or having the characters work through the implications of some technology that, really, must have been familiar to citizens living with these systems. Bedford's hero's frequent whinging over the meaning of life in a replicant world is only mildly distracting from the quite taunt mystery, and such philosophizing will likely fire the imagination of it's intended younger audience. I may prefer the deeper, subtler analysis presented in Karl Schroeder's Lady of Mazes or the intricate economics of Schroeder's Permanence to the hodgepodge of ideas thrown together in Bedford's novels, but it all works well enough as a backdrop to Hydrogen Steel's 'buddy movie' mystery.
Okay, still not particularly Canadian. Up to this point, no reason this could not have been published in the United States, or at least Australia.
What distinguishes Bedford's novel from the dozens of others of its ilk is the very Canadian ending: When our heroes finally solve the murder and uncover the awful truth — nobody much cares. Turns out, all that death and destruction and sacrifice were pretty much irrelevant.
Now that is an ending that isn't going to sell to the American mass market anytime soon. You can sell a conspiracy novel in the States, no problem; you can even have the conspirators win (did I mention that pretty much everyone on our side is dead by the end of the book?) — but you cannot have the hero and her team struggle for 350 pages, only to be handed the solution in the last ten pages by a bystander with a, "Oh, is this what you were looking for?" shrug. American readers expect their protangonists to confront and overcome some problem through dint of their own heroic efforts — being handed the solution by someone else and discovering that it was all a huge waste of time is simply not on.
I fully expect American reviewers to pan the ending, but like the editors at Edge, the novel kind of appealed to the Canadian in me. Given that our national character is defined by our identity crises and our sense that our efforts will always be overshadowed by the machinations of the overwhelming power to the South, the dominant themes of Hydrogen Steel hold a kind of resonance for us. So, all things considered, Hydrogen Steel is a decent enough novel, well worth a read.
Bedford is an award-winning Australian author, and this is his third novel for Calgary Publisher, Brian Hades (Edge SF). If you're wondering, as I did, why an Australian has to send his novels to Canada to get published, it may be because Hydrogen Steel has something of a Canadian outlook.
Zette McGee is a hard-boiled police detective who comes out of retirement when an alleged murderer appeals to her for help. Zette takes the case because the suspect knows more about Zette's own past than she does herself, and with the help of fellow retiree Gideon, they spend then next 350 pages chasing clues and avoiding assassination to stop them from uncovering the truth.
That's not the Canadian part, though.
Bedford has created an engaging mystery that keeps the reader turning pages, set against a future filled, packed — crowded, really — with futuristic tech: nano, renegade AIs, replicants with identity crises, wormhole space travel, alien monitors (mostly offstage), skyhooks, terraforming, and brain upgrades — the lot. Aging SF readers like myself might find it all a little too familiar and superficial, but younger readers are likely to be blown away by this rapid-fire assault of the next 'big idea'.
And to his credit, Bedford manages to avoid the worst excesses of expository lump, only occasionally pausing the story to explain this or that technology, or having the characters work through the implications of some technology that, really, must have been familiar to citizens living with these systems. Bedford's hero's frequent whinging over the meaning of life in a replicant world is only mildly distracting from the quite taunt mystery, and such philosophizing will likely fire the imagination of it's intended younger audience. I may prefer the deeper, subtler analysis presented in Karl Schroeder's Lady of Mazes or the intricate economics of Schroeder's Permanence to the hodgepodge of ideas thrown together in Bedford's novels, but it all works well enough as a backdrop to Hydrogen Steel's 'buddy movie' mystery.
Okay, still not particularly Canadian. Up to this point, no reason this could not have been published in the United States, or at least Australia.
What distinguishes Bedford's novel from the dozens of others of its ilk is the very Canadian ending: When our heroes finally solve the murder and uncover the awful truth — nobody much cares. Turns out, all that death and destruction and sacrifice were pretty much irrelevant.
Now that is an ending that isn't going to sell to the American mass market anytime soon. You can sell a conspiracy novel in the States, no problem; you can even have the conspirators win (did I mention that pretty much everyone on our side is dead by the end of the book?) — but you cannot have the hero and her team struggle for 350 pages, only to be handed the solution in the last ten pages by a bystander with a, "Oh, is this what you were looking for?" shrug. American readers expect their protangonists to confront and overcome some problem through dint of their own heroic efforts — being handed the solution by someone else and discovering that it was all a huge waste of time is simply not on.
I fully expect American reviewers to pan the ending, but like the editors at Edge, the novel kind of appealed to the Canadian in me. Given that our national character is defined by our identity crises and our sense that our efforts will always be overshadowed by the machinations of the overwhelming power to the South, the dominant themes of Hydrogen Steel hold a kind of resonance for us. So, all things considered, Hydrogen Steel is a decent enough novel, well worth a read.
August 3, 2007
Hydrogen Steel, K.A. Bedford, Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing, 2006
Zette McGee is a private investigator, and former cop, in a habitat on Ganymede. She abruptly retired from the force, rather than risk exposure of a personal secret. McGee is called out of retirement by a frantic phone call from android Kell Fallow, who knows her secret, and who swears he did not kill his family. Before Fallow can reach her, he is killed by a bomb in his gut.
At every step in the investigation, McGee, and Gideon Smith, a friend with a shadowy past, are stopped cold. It is the work of a firemind called Hydrogen Steel. Think of an artificial intelligence that has had eons of time (about a hundred years in human time) to grow and evolve. It can do a lot more than just read minds, for instance. Wherever they are, it can disable their ship, leaving them stranded in space. It can infect their neural implants with all sorts of major viruses. It can send an android that looks identical to McGee to destroy her residence. It can create intruders out of thin air, then disappear into thin air, to kill anyone it wishes. Hydrogen Steel can also infect McGee and Smith with bombs identical to the one that killed Fallow, forcing them to get quantum scans of their brains, and those scans downloaded into new bodies.
Hydrogen Steel’s mission is to prevent any release of information regarding how the Earth disappeared years before. There wasn’t any rubble from its destruction, just "poof." Another firemind, Otaru, finds out the truth, but knows that it will not survive the expected battle with Hydrogen Steel.
This is a gem of a novel. It’s a really good mystery/thriller; how does anyone deal with an entity that can reach into your DNA, and do something nasty? It’s also quite mind blowing, and is very much worth reading.
Zette McGee is a private investigator, and former cop, in a habitat on Ganymede. She abruptly retired from the force, rather than risk exposure of a personal secret. McGee is called out of retirement by a frantic phone call from android Kell Fallow, who knows her secret, and who swears he did not kill his family. Before Fallow can reach her, he is killed by a bomb in his gut.
At every step in the investigation, McGee, and Gideon Smith, a friend with a shadowy past, are stopped cold. It is the work of a firemind called Hydrogen Steel. Think of an artificial intelligence that has had eons of time (about a hundred years in human time) to grow and evolve. It can do a lot more than just read minds, for instance. Wherever they are, it can disable their ship, leaving them stranded in space. It can infect their neural implants with all sorts of major viruses. It can send an android that looks identical to McGee to destroy her residence. It can create intruders out of thin air, then disappear into thin air, to kill anyone it wishes. Hydrogen Steel can also infect McGee and Smith with bombs identical to the one that killed Fallow, forcing them to get quantum scans of their brains, and those scans downloaded into new bodies.
Hydrogen Steel’s mission is to prevent any release of information regarding how the Earth disappeared years before. There wasn’t any rubble from its destruction, just "poof." Another firemind, Otaru, finds out the truth, but knows that it will not survive the expected battle with Hydrogen Steel.
This is a gem of a novel. It’s a really good mystery/thriller; how does anyone deal with an entity that can reach into your DNA, and do something nasty? It’s also quite mind blowing, and is very much worth reading.
May 17, 2012
This has to be the best Bedford book I've read yet. His Hero is dynamic and likable on a level not seen in those other books. Where it looses points is in a less than dramitic ending that left me wanting more.
July 22, 2015
I am not sure what the problem was, but I could not get past the middle of this book. Boring, weird, but not enough to want to finish. A big disappointment to me, enjoyed other books by same author.
Want to read
November 19, 2008The title reminds me of Zoolander.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews