- Semiprozine Directory | Semiprozine.org –
- Approaching Pavonis Mons by balloon: Asimov’s Science Fiction – February 2015 – Reading this piece, I was struck by the sense – which I think has also been articulated by Gardner Dozois – that we're starting to see the emergence of what you might call the "New Default Future". Bear's world is one of vanishing privacy, information for all, continued social inequality, climate change as a given, radical lifestyle changes effected by new biotechnology. You can tweak the parameters a bit, but it does seem as if writers are once again beginning to converge on a shared sense of the future. No, it doesn't necessarily involve space colonies or rolling roads or flying cars, but it's no less valid, no less fascinating.
- We Need Diverse Books Authors Take on Publishing, Reader Prejudice – Flavorwire – A few weeks later We Need Diverse Books, the social media movement that has grown into a well-regarded nonprofit in a matter of months, was born. The founders had already started planning their campaign when, not for the last time, an incident of industry racism gave them momentum. In April, BookCon — a subsidiary of New York-based publishing mega-conference BookExpo — announced a panel of superstar children’s authors that consisted of all white men, while the overall conference lineup was all white people, aside from Grumpy Cat.
- GUEST POST: Elizabeth Bear on “Strong Female Characters” « Intellectus Speculativus – Specifically, my problem is that the idea that a female lead must be a “strong female character” leads to a whole complex of other problems. So here’s an inexhaustive survey of some of them, and some suggestions on how to avoid the traps.
- Conventional Wisdom by Arthur Drooker – Cool Hunting – This time, people are the focus of his lens for "Conventional Wisdom." Drooker plans on attending conventions across the United States to capture the inner-workings of dedicated, passionate and sometimes surprising, communities, all in service to his next proposed book. We're excited to share exclusive sneak peeks from his explorations, as the "Conventional Wisdom" trek unfolds.
Articles with the Tag Elizabeth Bear
Short SF marathon Day 2: Barber and Bear, oh my
Jessica Barber, “Coma Kings.” Lightspeed, February 2014.
This is the first thing I’ve read of Jessica Barber, a decent story that doesn’t quite come together. I think this is one of the sort of stories Jonathan McCalmont was talking about, in that the sfnal element is only there to facilitate what could just as well be a mainstream story, isn’t examined beyond this. Coma is a new virtual reality game that, well, locks you in your own brain while playing. Jenny is the secondbest player in the sate, save only her sister Annie, but Annie doesn’t play with her anymore. The reasons for why Jenny is desperate for her sister to play and the refusal of Annie to do so might be obvious considering the title, but Barber allows her story to reach that revelation naturally.
It’s just that the story doesn’t really progress after that, not so much ends but stops. Perhaps that was the only way that it could end, without resolution or change but it’s still slightly unsatisfying, even if it hits its emotional high. The game itself doesn’t convince, anything that you need complete concentration for to this extreme seems unlikely to take off in the way it apparantly has done here. Yes, there’s the Oculus Rift, but that doesn’t put you in a, well, coma.
But than the technology isn’t the point here, is it. It’s the emotional situation it makes possible, which could’ve been written in a more mundane way, with a sister in a real coma, but there that hope of her waking up and coming back to the world of her own accord would be far less, there wouldn’t be the possibility of contact, that why Barber needs the game there. Maybe she could’ve done more with it, had she had more space to do so.
Elizabeth Bear, “Covenant.” Slate, September 11, 2014.
Elizabeth Bear, “This Chance Planet.” Tor.com, October 22, 2014.
I first read one of Elizabeth Bear’s novels in 2013 and since then she’s become one of my favourite novelist, not having read any of her shorter work so far though. These two stories seem to be set in roughly the same future, sometime in the middle or late 21st centyury, after Peak Oil has finally forced the abandonment of private cars and everything that entails. It’s a slightly dated future, what with shale oil making it possible to burn up the planet long before we run out of gas…
“Covenant” is about a serial killer who’s undergone a rightminding and a gender change as part of their rehabilitation process, becoming the victim of another serial killer. It’s a decent story, with lots of internal monologuing explaining the rightminding process and all, so far the most old fashioned science fiction story I’ve read. I can’t stand serial killer stories normally, but Bear won me over with the rightminding, again the strongest actual sfnal element I’ve seen so far. The ramifications of such a technique, the impact on one individual are explored in a way that Barber doesn’t do in her story with the Coma game.
“This Chance Planet”, after a Maurice Maeterlinck quote, doesn’t really have a reason to be set in the future. It could just as well been written as an contemporary fairy story, about a stray dog in the Moscow metro forcing a woman to realise what a deadbeat her boyfriend is. One of those stories where you can’t quite believe the relationship, the protagonist being that blind to her boyfriend’s faults.
Scardown — Elizabeth Bear
Scardown
Elizabeth Bear
368 pages
published in 2005
Scardown is Elizabeth Bear’s second novel, sequel to Hammered, continuing the adventures of Jenny Casey. Where Hammered was straight up streetlevel cyberpunk, in Scardown the perspective opens up. That opening up actually started in the last pages of Hammered and Scardown continues seamlessly. Middle books in a trilogy, as this is can often sag, neither setting up plotlines nor resolving them, but Scardown avoids this fate. Each of the books in the Hammered/Scardown/Worldwired has its own story, but together they do add up to one coherent one.
Jenny Casey is a veteran who lost her left arm and eye in a war in South Africa decades ago, replaced by fairly primitive cyborg implants. Her ability to cope and survive for so long with these implants made her an unique candidate for starship pilot training, as these pilots would need to be plugged into their spaceships. This is why she was being pursued by the Canadian government in the previous novel, Canada and China being the world’s two superpowers in 2062. The world is dying, killed by climate change and humanity’s hope lies in the stars. Which is why both superpowers are building starships, starships made possible by alien technology found on Mars.
Hammered ended with Jenny Casey and her lover Gabe Castaign setting foot on board the Montreal, Canada’s first functional starship. Scardown begins with Jenny making preparations for her first trip as a pilot with the ship. She has made her peace with colonel Valens — the villain of the previous book — for the moment, even if she’s not reconcilled with what he did to her decades earlier. It’s just that she knows they all have bigger problems now. On a more optimistic note, at least she, Gabe and Elspeth Dunsany have come to an understanding regarding their relationships, starting to form a proper family together with Gabe’s two daughters, Leah and Genie.
Valens meanwhile is shown to be more than just a cardboard villain, or even the dedicated patriot trying to do the best for his country, no matter the cost that he was in Hammered. This is done not just because we get to see more of what motivates him, but also because of the introduction of his granddaughter Patty, who with Leah Castaign is one of the young volunteers for the starship programme. It’s just one example of how Bear opens up the story in this volume, following not just the characters from the first book — Jenny, Elspeth, Gabe, the Richard Feynman AI, Razorface et all– but also giving more screentime to secondary characters like Valens, as well as introducting new characters: Min-xue, a Chinese starship pilot, a young Canadian terrorist called Indigo Xu who has business with Jenny, the Canadian prime minister Constance Riel, various others.
This wider range of viewpoints compared to Hammered reinforces the opening up of the story. This is no longer about Jenny Casey and while it remains her story, what’s at stake is no longer the fate of one woman, but that of whole nations. Both the Chinese and the Canadian governments are convinced Earth’s climate is damaged to the point of unsustainability and the only solution is to get as many people off planet and to the stars as possible. Yet neither is willing to see the other side getting their first, with the Chinese in particular aggressive in sabotaging the Canadian process.
To be honest, the geopolitics (literally) is perhaps the most unconvincing aspect of the story. It was already established in the previous novel that the US had become a fundamentalist state for a while and therefore drifted out of superpower status, but to see Canada, at the head of the Commonwealth — the UK having frozen over when the Gulfstream shut down — as the dominant superpower together with China is a bit difficult to believe. India and Pakistan apparantly had a brief nuclear war sometime before 2062, while the European Union, Russia, Africa and South America are only mentioned in passing. It doesn’t quite convince me as a possible future, it feels more like a bog standard dystopian sf future with some of the furniture moved.
But that’s a minor quibble. Some of the background may bit a bit sketchy, the story Bear tells with it is worth it. There’s a steady ratching up of tension as the various plotlines come together, culminating in a climax about fourfifths through the book that’s literally world changing, the last fifth of the story dealing with the fallout of it.
What really impressed me about Scardown though — which in a better world wouldn’t be a reason to be impressed by a sf novel — is the wide variety of well rounded female characters in it. This is a book that passes the Bechdel test with flying colours. It’s not just Jenny Casey who’s important, all the named female characters are driving the plot as much as their male counterparts, if not more. Similarly, like Casey, most of the important characters are pushing middle age, with everything that entails. They carry the aches and pains and experiences of four-five decades of living. That too is somewhat unusual in science fiction.
Hammered — Elizabeth Bear
Hammered
Elizabeth Bear
324 pages
published in 2005
Elizabeth Bear is a newish science fiction writer who I’ve been aware off, but hadn’t read anything off until now. Hammered is her first novel, published in 2005 along with its two sequels, Scardown and Worldwired. It was well recieved, with Bear winning both the 2005 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and the 2006 Locus Award for Best First Novel. Both are well deserved, as this is one of the better first novels I’ve ever read. Elizabeth Bear is in complete control throughout and it reads like the work of a much more experienced writer.
Hammered starts out in the most cyberpunk posssible way, with local gangster boss Razorface bringing a kid overdosing on an army combat drug called Hammer to Maker, Jenny Casey, a UN combat veteran of what wasn’t WWII, now left with a cyborg left arm and prosthetic left eye, to see if she can save him. Razorface has mouth full with “a triple row of stainless steel choppers”, hence his nickname, while Jenny has hers because she fixes things. Neither is fond of Hammer, a dangerous drug even when pure and the batch the kid o.d. on is anything but. Some corporation is leaking tainted drugs in their city (Hartford, Connecticut) and together they have to stop them. Meanwhile, an online multiplayer game in which the best players get a chance at piloting a virtual star ship is infiltrated by an AI, who suspects the game is more than just entertainment. It’s 2062, climate change and the wars resulting from it have wrecked the world, China and Canada are locked in a Cold War and somebody’s after Jenny Casey. It might even be her sister.
But while the setting might be cyberpunk, Jenny Casey’s life lacks the glamour a heroine in a Gibson story would’ve had. Her metal arm suffers from phantom pains, fucks up her shoulder and back where it attaches to the rest of her and while her artificial eye is an advantage in a low light situation, it’s a pain most of the rest of the time. She has had to live with her cybernetic implants, not just the arm and eye but also the enhanced nervous system that can make her reaction speed inhumanly fast when needed, for some twentyfive years and now that she’s pushing fifty, she’s suffering for it. She’s no Molly, cool cyberchick, but a woman who has had to learn to live with the limitations of her body.
She’s not the only great female character in this novel. There’s also Dr. Elspeth Dunsany, who spent the last twelve years in prison for violation of the Military Powers Act, released so she can do what she refused to do twelve years ago, built a tame AI for Unitek, the most powerful corporation in the world, brought back by colonel Valens, the villain of the piece, the spider in the web who is also an old ‘friend’ of Jenny and who is moving all the players together for his project. Elspeth allowed him to get her, both to get out of prison but also because her father is dying. Like Jenny, she’s not a young woman anymore and like her, she also has to live with what her history has brought her.
Not that Bear neglects her male characters. Apart from Valens, who isn’t quite the black and white villain you see him as in the first half of the book, there’s also Gabe Castaign, the man who actually saved Jenny from that burning APC in South Africa that cost her her arm, now also working for Valens. There’s Razorface of course, somebody else who has to struggle with his personal history and his status as number one gangster in Hartford with younger and more ruthless ones coming up to challenge him. But most of all there’s the AI, Richard Feynman, personality based on the American mathematician. There’s always a temptation for a cyberpunk writer to use an AI as deux ex machina, but Bear mostly avoids this.
One of the dirty little not so secrets of first wave cyberpunk was how much it shared the obsession with getting into space and off Earth as the salvation of humanity with classical science fiction, only slightly more realistic (ie with all the politics and crime it nicked from the hardboiled detective genre). This idea is at the heart of Hammered too, the one thing in which it followds older cyberpunk like Neuromancer unreservedly. In most other aspects, Hammered subverts or rejects the stereotypical cyberpunk tropes, as with Jenny’s cyborgisation above. These aren’t low punks with high techs, disaffected teens and twentysomethings looking cool, but real grownups dealing with real grownup problems, as well as the legacy of everything they fucked up in their lives when they were twentysomething themselves. It reminds me of Melissa Scott’s Trouble and her Friends, another book that took the easy cliches of the underground hacking elite and looked at them with an adult eye.
I read the first third or so of this book the way I normally read, in short bursts inbetween doing other stuff, but the last twothirds I read in one big gulp, everything else forgotten. And once I’d finished, I read the other two books in the same way. Higher praise than that I cannot give.