Hydrogen Steel [Paperback]

Adult/High School—Hydrogen Steel features a main character who has only recently figured out that she's a machine. As she spirals into an identity crisis, she wonders which of her memories were implanted and whether an android is worthy of love. The story takes off when an old friend arrives with a bomb in his stomach. This novel covers much of the same terrain as Phillip K. Dick's work, including Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Bedford's novel features a similarly vulnerable and confused protagonist, reality is fluid, and no one can quite say what it means to be human. But he also offers a more humane take than Dick ever gave his subjects, with characters who are amiable and sane compared to Dick's usual misanthropic outcasts. Action is nonstop, and there are endless plot twists in this satisfying story. Bedford makes the far-out seem familiar: spaceships have make and model numbers, interplanetary travel can be done business class. This familiarity brings readers back to the story's heart. These people may be enhanced with robotics and nanocomputers, but they're really not so different from us. The author builds a well-realized portrait of someone trying to understand who she is, something that will resonate with almost any teen.—Emma Coleman, Berkeley Public Library, CA
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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.

But when Kell Fallow is killed by a bomb he didn't know was buried in his guts, and when a homebrew android identical to Zette destroys her home on the luxurious Serendipity habitat, Gideon and Zette go on the run, only to run afoul of sabotage, spies, nasty infections, and bad guys galore and ordinary machines come to relentless, murderous life.

The case will take Zette and Gideon on a terrifying journey into the darkest reaches of human space, in pursuit of an ancient truth -- and will bring her into deadly contact with that truth's keeper, the awesomely powerful firemind, Hydrogen Steel, an artificial consciousness evolved far beyond its original design, and which is utterly determined to keep that same truth from getting out, at any cost.

Hydrogen Steel is a tense and thrilling mystery within a mystery, a tale of secrets and truth, and a journey to the limits of existence--and a bit beyond!

K. A. Bedford was born in Fremantle, and attended both Curtin and Murdoch University in Perth where he studied writing, theatre, and philosophy prior to his becoming actively involved in the Australian SF community. HYDROGEN STEEL is his third novel. He lives with his wife, Michelle, near Perth, Western Australia.