Hull Zero Three

Hull Zero Three is a science fiction novel by the American writer Greg Bear, published on 22 November 2010. It is set on a generation ship that has lost its way under circumstances nobody aboard can explain.

The book opens with a man coming out of a dreamlike state, naked and freezing, with no idea who he is or where he is. A little girl takes charge of him and leads him through the corridors of a generation ship looking for warmth; she calls him Teacher, and on the way the two of them run into a number of other beings, some of them dangerous. Control of the ship is contested in short, abrupt sections while the travellers try to survive and to work out what is going on. Teacher eventually learns that he is a clone and has been brought back several times before, and that the earlier versions of him did not last. Those earlier versions were able to leave fragments of information behind, a trail of notes for whoever came next, and it is from those notes that he pieces together the real nature of his situation. His companions are clones as well, engineered for particular purposes, and what the vessel was built to do is not what it now appears to want.

Bear's science fiction often works at the scale of biology and deep time, and this novel keeps its scope to the inside of one ship, where the environment itself is the antagonist. The question the book keeps returning to is what a vessel built to carry a population means once the population and the mission have come apart.