<![CDATA[io9: Elizabeth Bear]]> http://cache.io9.com/assets/base/img/thumbs140x140/io9.com.png <![CDATA[io9: Elizabeth Bear]]> http://io9.com/tag/elizabeth bear http://io9.com/tag/elizabeth bear <![CDATA[March Books: Revamped Russian Folklore And Post-Apocalyptic Adventures]]> On the bookshelves this month: A Soviet Koschei the Deathless, magical gambling, and one faerie girl-fight. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5771820&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[The Shoggoth slaves of World War II]]> I recently urged my friends on Twitter to consider writing a version of H.P. Lovecraft's "At The Mountains Of Madness" from the perspective of a shuggoth slave rebellion. Which resulted in many people reminding me of Elizabeth Bear's incredible novelette, "Shoggoths In Bloom," which originally appeared in Asimov's and won the 2009 Hugo for best novelette. Now you can read this weird tale of the Old Ones' polymorphous slaves in World War II - it's free on Bear's website. There are no slave rebellions here, but there's a horrific apprehension of what it means to be both monster and slave. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5780439&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[Philip K. Dick Award shortlist: 7 daring stories of zombies, generation ships and terraforming]]> The Philip K. Dick Award, for science fiction books originally published in paperback instead of hardcover, put out its shortlist for the year, and chances are a few books on the list haven't been on your radar. (The list does include Project Itoh's Harmony, which was one of our favorite books of 2010.) Since these books are all out in paperback, they're pretty inexpensive, and they all sound pretty intriguing. Here's the list: More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5738490&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[December Books Bring Guerrilla Tailoring, Alchemy, and Plenty of Zombies]]> It's December, when the days get shorter and colder. But there's no frigate like a book, and this month your ship's come in: The month's new books include cut-throat tailors, steampunk Wyatt Earp, and zombie Star Wars. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5708818&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[One of last year's coolest anthologies gets a sequel]]> Metatropolis thrilled us with its near-future shared world and its daring take on urban decay and reinvention. So we're psyched that a second volume is coming out — focusing exclusively on one of the most memorable settings in the first book, the reborn Pacific Northwest known as Cascadia. Edited by Jay Lake, whose "In The Forests Of The Night" brought Cascadia to life, the new volume will once again be written for audio-book and released by Audible.com. Here's the blurb: More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5657396&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA["Tideline" Is Scifi's Answer To The Giving Tree]]> In scifi, the robot-human relationship is often a relationship that must be watched keenly, as machines with self-awareness cannot be trusted. Elizabeth Bear's beautiful story, "Tideline", doesn't deal with master-slave relationships. Rather, its themes echo a Shel Silverstein children's classic. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5528655&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[Strange Visitors And Broken Hearts Will Restore Your Faith In Short Fiction]]> If you believe in reading short fiction for pleasure, you're condemned to frequent disappointment. Most short fiction, even the good stuff, is... laborious. So when reading the anthology Eclipse Three, you may be startled at the unexpected sensation of enjoyment. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5408571&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[The New Noir Fantasy Shows Magical Cities In Decay]]> A noir light is shining over fantasy — many of the best fantasy books on the shelves right now feature bloody-minded, morally gray protagonists battling their way through rotten cities and bleak landscapes. Here's why noir is truest urban fantasy. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5362187&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[Metatropolis Is The Best Kind Of Urban Renewal]]> The futuristic city is often a supporting character in science fiction, but these urban visions rarely feel like places you could live in. So Metatropolis, a new anthology of city tales, is a nice surprise. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5169857&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[Secrets Of Great Characters, According To 6 Science Fiction Authors]]> Click to viewAmazing stories need great characters. And when you're writing a story set in a futuristic or fantastical world, it's more important than ever for readers to be able to relate to your characters. It's also harder than ever, because your characters' lives and experiences will be totally different than your readers'. How do you make people identify with someone who lives in the future, or on another planet? How can your main character stand out, against a bizarre and colorful backdrop? We asked six great science fiction authors for their advice. Get to know them as individuals, rather than types. If your characters are cut off from all the present-day cultural references, like "lawyer who went to Harvard," then it's even more important to think of them as individuals, says Elizabeth Bear, Campbell- and Hugo-winning author of Carnival and Undertow. "Try very hard to know them as people," she urges. "That goes for any setting, past or present or future - or alternate reality." In particular, you should think, "'This is a person who happens to have the following traits, and all that they imply,' rather than 'this is a nuclear physicist who grew up in Iowa.'" Try making your characters scientists. Or at least, have them be obsessed with stuff that's relavant to your storyline, advises Kim Stanley Robinson, Hugo- and Nebula-winning author of the Mars trilogy and the Science In The Capital series. Having scientists as your characters lets you "explore the setting and the character at once." And it helps if your characters obsess about the mysteries and explanations in your story. They can also be obsessed with a planet, spaceship, new procedure or alien. Base them on people you know. The most realistic characters are often based closely on your friends or people you've met, says Rudy Rucker, Philip K. Dick-winning author of the -Ware novels and Postsingular. That goes double for your aliens, A.I.s and robots, he adds. It's always better to copy your friends than to lift from "received ideas about how SF characters might behave. Who wants to see yet another a humorless talking head with a BBC accent? The absolute worst thing in Matrix III was when Keanu gets to the virtual office of the Big Computer Mind, and he meets, like, a tweedy professor with a white beard. Ugh! At the very least it should have been a fat hacker in a T-shirt, preferably high on pineal extract." Also: to make your characters stand out, try having them say quirky, unexpected things. "Forget your Star Trek memories, and remember your wild and crazy friends - the ones who say things that Make No Sense," Rucker advises. Give them a thought-out world. The more carefully thought out the world you're placing your characters into, the more we'll be able to believe that they live there, says Tobias Buckell, author of Sly Mongoose. And that also makes it easier to "contrast them against this imaginary place." Figure out what they love, and what they fear. Try to find what drives your characters, including what they want and need, Bear urges. And understand what traumatizes them. "I tell people I like to know what they'd want on their tombstone: that seems to give me a really good handle on who they are." She adds:
Characters we can relate to have fears and damage, but moreover, for me they have to be devoted to something - an ideal, a person, whatever. Even villains become much more sympathetic when we're introduced to whatever it is that they love.
Kage Baker, author of the Company novels, agrees: "It isn't the way a person relates to his hovercar that makes him memorable; it's what's going on in his heart." No matter what planet or time you're living in, there will be "certain constants in human existence: struggle against poverty, rebellion against authority, love and desire, loneliness, curiosity. Any reader can relate to those." Make sure your character has loves and hatreds that readers can see themselves in, and the rest will take care of itself. Don't aim for larger-than-life - and overshoot. One pitfall with science fiction characters is that authors sometimes make their characters "bigger than life, or archetypal" to let them compete with the big, brash colorful worlds they live in. A common mistake is veering past archetypal, all the way into "over the top, or maybe somewhat cliche." If you do try for archetypal characters, think of the classics from all genres, like Sherlock Holmes' quirky genius or Captain Ahab's drive. Don't obsess too much about setting and toys. If you spend pages and pages on dense descriptions of your settings and how exactly your hovercar works, you're distracting the reader from your characters, says Baker.
It's enough to say "He climbed into his hovercar" and your reader will get the idea. You don't need to give a geography lesson: "They were sitting in the courtyard drinking fire-palm wine" or "She trudged back from the well, balancing her water jar" or "They looked out across the desert and saw the yellow mountains of Califia before them" all give brief, intense impressions of a place, without stopping the narrative in its tracks or drawing focus from the main character.
Find out who's hurting. If your story involves a new situation or technological breakthrough, figure out who suffers as a result - maybe that should be your main character, says Robinson, quoting from Damon Knight (who was quoting James Blish in turn.) Keep your characters grounded. The stranger the setting, the more ordinary your characters should be, says Terry Bisson, Hugo- and Nebula-winning author of Bears Discover Fire. "For example, in my most recent story, the narrator 'had a job and an apartment, but that was all.' The story wasn't about the setting but about the character." Your characters should be "totally convinced they live in the present, rather than the future. Because, of course, it IS the present to them," says David J. Williams, author of The Mirrored Heavens. Make sure your world, and your characters, both have a believable past, that anchors their present. "As Gibson said, the future's already here, it's just unevenly distributed. Same is true for the past: it's always with us, but sometimes beneath the surface. How one handles that is the key to character." More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5065556&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[Great Opening Sentences From Science Fiction]]> Click to viewYou can tell a lot about a science fiction book from its first sentence. Those first few words (or few dozen, in some cases) have to pull you into the story and bring you into a whole alternate world. A good first sentence "hooks" you, pulling you into the story with a quick jolt of action and mystery. But a great first sentence does way more than that - it establishes a tone, it sticks in your mind, and it's like a little otherworldly koan, confounding your expectations. And maybe freaking your shit a little. Here are our favorite science fiction opening sentences. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5027128&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[All Locus Awards Voters Are Not Created Equal]]> Remember how we called the Locus Awards "possibly the most democratic" of the science fiction awards? Well, uh, never mind. The Locus Awards changed their rules after everyone had already voted, making Locus Magazine subscriber votes count twice as much as other votes, to deny Cory Doctorow the win for best short-story collection after his huge online following all voted for him. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5023935&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[Science Versus Magic — Is There a Difference in the World of Fiction?]]> One of the biggest debates among people who like scifi — aside from the Star Wars vs. Star Trek thing — is where to draw the line between science and magic. Some adhere to the idea that magic is simply science that we don't yet understand, others feel that magic represents an essential mystery that can't be understood rationally. Of course the other big dividing line between magic and science has to do with genre: magic appears mostly in fantasy stories, and science (of course) in science fiction. And yet there is currently a trend in the scifi world toward creating stories that blur the line between science and magic: A lot of steampunk novels blend technology and sorcery (one of my favorite examples is in Elizabeth Bear's New Amsterdam, where one of the characters is a "forensic sorceress"). And shows like Lost and X-Files have frequently mingled the mystical and the rational. We talked to five authors whose fiction blurs the line between magic and science to find out what they thought of the difference between the two. Here's what they said. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5021701&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[Environmental Fascists Fight Gun-Loving Lesbians for Alien Technology]]> Two spies, one trained in the art of lying and the other in the art of reading people for signs of subterfuge, have been sent to steal alien technology from Amazonia, a planet ruled by man-enslaving lesbians. Our spies are emissaries from a male-dominated, interplanetary government ruled by ruthless artificial intelligences who enforce carbon neutrality on all worlds by genociding any group that uses too much energy. Their hope is that the alien technology can end the eco-fascist reign of terror by providing an infinite source of renewable energy. This premise for Elizabeth Bear's novel Carnival, published a little over a year ago, is so intriguing that you'll keep reading just to watch the fine machinery of her thought experiment unfold. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=387818&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[With Online Collaborative Novel "Shadow Unit," Can Fanfic Cross Over?]]> Elizabeth Bear, author of awesome scifi novel Carnival along with many others, writes in to tell us about an interesting new online project she's involved with. It's called Shadow Unit, and it's basically an effort to turn the tradition of group-written fanfiction into something more literary than gushing over Harry Potter's pink cheeks. With fanfiction fast becoming an accepted way to break into the book biz, and somebody like Bear on board, we're definitely paying attention. Shadow Unit was created by Emma Bull, who has taught at prestigious scifi writers workshop Clarion West, with help from Will Shetterly, Sarah Monette, and Amanda Downum. Here's what Bear had to say about it. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=359363&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[War Machines and Their Children in New Elizabeth Bear Story, Free Online]]> Science fiction and urban fantasy author Elizabeth Bear always surprises you. She'll write hard military SF like the superlative Carnival, complete with spies and alien tech, and then she'll turn around and write a book like New Amsterdam, about a forensic sorceress in an alternate-ninteenth century New York City full of crime and magic. Her restless, weird imagination always brings contradictory ideas together in a pleasing mashup. You can sample some of Bear's talent in her recent short story "Tideline," now free online, about a derelict war bot who befriends a homeless kid. More »
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