Locus Online
    THE MAGAZINE OF THE SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY FIELD
 
 
Interview thread
<< prev | next >>
April 2006

Profile
-
Complete
Table of Contents

-
Justina Robson
Interview

-
Elizabeth Bear
Interview
-
Locus Bestsellers
-
New & Notable Books

-
April Issue Thread
<< prev | next >>

-
Mailing Date:
30 March 2006

Locus Magazine
Indexes
 
 
 
Elizabeth Bear: Broken Futures
Sarah Bear Elizabeth Wishnevsky was born in Hartford, Connecticut. She studied English and Anthropology at the University of Connecticut, but did not graduate. She has worked as a technical writer, a stable hand, a reporter, and in various office jobs. Though she sold a few stories to small-press publications in the '90s, she only began writing seriously in 2001, and has produced numerous novels and short stories since.

Her first novel Hammered (2005) began the Jenny Casey trilogy -- actually a single long novel published in three volumes -- which also includes Scardown (2005) and Worldwired (2005). Forthcoming books include standalone SF novels Undertow and Carnival; the first two books in her sprawling Promethean Age fantasy series, Blood & Iron and Whiskey & Water; and a collection, The Chains that You Refuse (2006). She won the Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2005.

She married Christopher Kindred in 2000 and moved to North Las Vegas, Nevada, where she lived until moving back to Connecticut in 2006.
Photo by Beth Gwinn

Official Website
Excerpts from the interviews:

“I turned 30 within a month of 9/11, and lost my job in the immediate aftermath. I spent about a month watching daytime television and sending out resumes. There's only so much daytime TV you can watch and so many times you can take the dogs to the park, so I started writing. At that point, it was just something to fill up the time. Then a friend sent me to an online writing workshop. There are two kinds of writing workshop, in a very broad sense: cheerleaders, and people who are driven and obsessed. By sheer luck, I happened to fall into a group who were driven, always urging each other to submit, to do better, to write more stories. For some reason, in that high-pressure situation I really thrived. I wrote my first completed novel by January 2002. (It's itty-bitty and not very good -- a typical first novel in that the ideas are kinda cool but the implementation is lacking.)”

*

“The three Jenny Casey books -- Hammered, Scardown, and Worldwired -- were written as one novel, but not all at the same time. At the end of Hammered I knew I had gotten to a pause point, not the end of the story. Scardown is the Empire Strikes Back of the trilogy, because of that really downer ending. I used a classical three-act structure because it's a thriller plot, so you have the ascending action, then this nadir point at the end of the second book -- though in the third book, Worldwired, things actually get worse. Finding a suitable climax was quite a challenge, since it's hard to come up with a bigger threat than what happened in the second book. I have ideas for two more books set in that milieu at some point in the future, but they probably would not have the same characters (I'm a very character-driven writer).

“There's a lot in those books that's intentionally a tour of the last 30 years of science fiction: a cyberpunk thread, a military history thread, a singularity thread. They're very self-aware books, with a lot of participation in the 'genre conversation' and looking at the way the various tracks in that conversation interlink. People talk about science fiction splitting into all these subgenres that have nothing to do with each other, but really they all come from the same place; they're just approaching it from different angles.”

*

“"I've finished and delivered another science fiction novel, Carnival, which is coming out in the fall. (2006 is a three-book year, and 2007 is only going to be a two-book year. Something can be said for having a deep trunk.) It's set in a libertarian feminist dystopia where men are kind of second-class citizens -- I've been telling people it's the unholy love child of Joanna Russ and Robert Heinlein. This planet goes by the unlikely name of New Amazonia. (As one of the residents says to a visitor from Earth, 'Just because we're feminists doesn't mean we don't have a sense of humor.') It also has an energy source which is the cool, shiny science-fictional idea in the book. Now I'm working on Undertow, another SF novel involving a floating city.

“This summer's book will be Blood & Iron, my first fantasy novel. That should be the first novel in what hopefully will be a vast, sprawling cycle called The Promethean Age. So far I've written five books in it and two are sold -- Blood & Iron and Whiskey & Water (scheduled for 2007). They are standalone novels that all take place in the same world, our own or one very close to it, and have similar characters. I'm dealing with fairies, so there are people who can live 400 years. The books are set largely in Faerie, New York City, and Connecticut. I like writing about the places I grew up and places I've lived, because it's harder to write about a city you've never lived in and make it feel real.”

*

“I write my science fiction and fantasy exactly the same way: I try to be very rigorous and create logical structures. Science fiction is this great big chessboard, a game where you're moving stuff around, breaking it to see what happens. It's the literature of testing to destruction.”


 
  TOP    
   
© 2006 by Locus Publications. All rights reserved.