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

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The AI Paradox - Virginia Dignum ****

This is a really important book in the way that Virginia Dignum highlights various ways we can misunderstand AI and its abilities using a series of paradoxes. However, I need to say up front that I'm giving it four stars for the ideas: unfortunately the writing is not great. It reads more like a government report than anything vaguely readable - it really should have co-authored with a professional writer to make it accessible. Even so, I'm recommending it: like some government reports it's significant enough to make it necessary to wade through the bureaucrat speak. Why paradoxes? Dignum identifies two ways we can think about paradoxes (oddly I wrote about paradoxes recently , but with three definitions): a logical paradox such as 'this statement is false', or a paradoxical truth such as 'less is more' - the second of which seems a better to fit to the use here.  We are then presented with eight paradoxes, each of which gives some insights into aspects of t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Einstein's Fridge - Paul Sen ****

In Einstein's Fridge (interesting factoid: this is at least the third popular science book to be named after Einstein's not particularly exciting refrigerator), Paul Sen has taken on a scary challenge. As Jim Al-Khalili made clear in his excellent The World According to Physics , our physical understanding of reality rests on three pillars: relativity, quantum theory and thermodynamics. But there is no doubt that the third of these, the topic of Sen's book, is a hard sell. While it's true that these are the three pillars of physics, from the point of view of making interesting popular science, the first two might be considered pillars of gold and platinum, while the third is a pillar of salt. Relativity and quantum theory are very much of the twentieth century. They are exciting and sometimes downright weird and wonderful. Thermodynamics, by contrast, has a very Victorian feel and, well, is uninspiring. Luckily, though, thermodynamics is important enough, lying behind ...
Post a Comment
Read more