Skip to main content

Elizabeth Bear - Four Way Interview

Elizabeth Bear won the John W. Campbell award for Best New Writer in 2005 and has since published 15 novels and numerous short stories. She writes in both the SF and fantasy genres and has won critical acclaim in both. She has won the Hugo Award more than once. She lives in Massachusetts. Her latest title is Ancestral Night.

Why science fiction?

 I've been a science fiction fan my entire life, and I feel like SF is the ideal framework for stories about humanity and how we can be better at it. Not just cautionary tales - though there's certainly also value in cautionary tales - but stories with some hope built in that we might, in fact, mature as a species and take some responsibility for things like reflexive bigotry and hate crimes (as I'm writing this, the heartbreaking news about the terrorist attack on Muslim worshipers in Christchurch is everywhere) and global climate destabilization. These are not intractable problems, but we need, as a species, the will to see that we are all in it together and that the stakes are enormously high.

Because we are a species that exchanges information by creating narratives - by storytelling! - I believe that there is enormous value in creating stories in which we have found ways to solve those problems, to invent more fair systems  of government, to embrace our responsibility to the human family, to interrogate our reflexive behaviors and make better choices.

Also, science fiction is fun! It's delightful to go zooming around the galaxy and scooping up stardust and meeting weird aliens!

 Why this book?

 Right now, because I think we desperately need to start addressing the fact that our best and most egalitarian systems of government (the ones that maximize well-being for the most people) are based on millennium-old ideas, and maybe it's time to start developing some systems that take advantage of modern technologies of information management and group decision-making. Not just in the scary totalitarian social media panopticon way, but in manners that might be liberating to the maximum number of humans.

There's a brilliant Ursula Le Guin story, 'The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,' that deals with the personal decision to walk away from a corrupt and exploitative but comfortable system and live in the wilderness instead.

But what if we could change those corrupt systems? Where's the ethical balance point between freedom and social responsibility? Between a safe, post-scarcity affluence (or at least comfort) for all, and the desire to Do Big Risky Things, to explore and innovate, and seek rewards for that? 

This feels very topical to me right now, in the world of Trumpism and resurgent Fascism and a new gilded age of oligarchy.

 What's next?

 Right this second, I am working on the sequel to ANCESTRAL NIGHT, called MACHINE. It's not a direct sequel - ANCESTRAL NIGHT is designed to stand alone, as a novel you can just pick up and read and then be finished with and have gotten a whole story in one book (retro, I know) - but it takes place shortly after ANCESTRAL NIGHT, and some characters from the first book do appear in the second one. 

In MACHINE, we get to meet a daring trauma doctor who specializes in space rescues, and visit a massive, multispecies galactic hospital where something is subtly, terribly wrong. :D  

 What's exciting you at the moment?

 I'm going to Luxembourg for the first time next month! My husband (Scott Lynch, also a novelist) and I will be guests of honor at Luxcon, the flagship Luxembourg City science fiction convention. I am incredibly excited about this!

I'm excited about Captain Marvel; and my friend Arkady Martine's first novel, A Memory Called Empire, which comes out this month; and I'm excited about the new album from The National that comes out in May.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin Five Way Interview

Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin (born in 1999) is a distinguished composer, concert pianist, music theorist and researcher. Three of his piano CDs have been released in Germany. He started his undergraduate degree at the age of 13 in Kazakhstan, and having completed three musical doctorates in prominent Italian music institutions at the age of 20, he has mastered advanced composition techniques. In 2024 he completed a PhD in music at the University of St Andrews / Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (researching timbre-texture co-ordinate in avant- garde music), and was awarded The Silver Medal of The Worshipful Company of Musicians, London. He has held visiting affiliations at the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and UCL, and has been lecturing and giving talks internationally since the age of 13. His latest book is Quantum Mechanics and Avant Garde Music . What links quantum physics and avant-garde music? The entire book is devoted to this question. To put it briefly, there are many different link...
Post a Comment
Read more

Should we question science?

I was surprised recently by something Simon Singh put on X about Sabine Hossenfelder. I have huge admiration for Simon, but I also have a lot of respect for Sabine. She has written two excellent books and has been helpful to me with a number of physics queries - she also had a really interesting blog, and has now become particularly successful with her science videos. This is where I'm afraid she lost me as audience, as I find video a very unsatisfactory medium to take in information - but I know it has mass appeal. This meant I was concerned by Simon's tweet (or whatever we are supposed to call posts on X) saying 'The Problem With Sabine Hossenfelder: if you are a fan of SH... then this is worth watching.' He was referencing a video from 'Professor Dave Explains' - I'm not familiar with Professor Dave (aka Dave Farina, who apparently isn't a professor, which is perhaps a bit unfortunate for someone calling out fakes), but his videos are popular and he...
Post a Comment
Read more

Everything is Predictable - Tom Chivers *****

There's a stereotype of computer users: Mac users are creative and cool, while PC users are businesslike and unimaginative. Less well-known is that the world of statistics has an equivalent division. Bayesians are the Mac users of the stats world, where frequentists are the PC people. This book sets out to show why Bayesians are not just cool, but also mostly right. Tom Chivers does an excellent job of giving us some historical background, then dives into two key aspects of the use of statistics. These are in science, where the standard approach is frequentist and Bayes only creeps into a few specific applications, such as the accuracy of medical tests, and in decision theory where Bayes is dominant. If this all sounds very dry and unexciting, it's quite the reverse. I admit, I love probability and statistics, and I am something of a closet Bayesian*), but Chivers' light and entertaining style means that what could have been the mathematical equivalent of debating angels on...
Post a Comment
Read more