Deep Blue Interview with author Elizabeth Bear.

Elizabeth Bear is the author of over a dozen science fiction and fantasy novels, a Campbell Award laureate, and a bit of a dilettante. She was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year, and she’s always wanted to be a science fiction writer when she grows up. Lately, it’s looking like the second of those two conditions is unlikely to happen any time soon.

She lives near Hartford, Connecticut, in a tiny apartment with a presumptuous cat.

DBJ: You may not be familiar with my work, but after reading several interviews with you about yours, I know that we have some things in common. One is a fascination with patterns. Tell us about how patterns affect writing, and life, from your perspective…

BEAR: I think it’s my slightly nonstandard brain, in all truth. I seem to have a fairly uncommon cognitive style, which is not very adapted to linear thought models of the sort most people use, but is shifted towards inductive reasoning. I tend to see things as sets of relationships rather than discrete items–webs or networks rather than chains, as it were.

I’ve had a heck of a time trying to learn to tell stories in a straightforward linear fashion.

The thing is, to the human brain, everything is patterns. We are highly evolved, highly organized pattern-sensing and pattern-matching machines. It’s what allows us to navigate through the world, to spot predators and food, to anticipate the behavior of allies and cooperators. I think it’s why we like fiction: fiction imposes a set of narrative patterns on the world. It makes things make sense, when really, they often don’t.

Cory Doctorow has a theory that fiction in some regard arises from theportion of our brain that exists to empathize with and model the behavior of other humans–our cooperating, social software, as it were. I think it’s an interesting argument.

DBJ: With SF/F/H themes leaking into the mainstream of entertainment, taking over television and film and showing up in mainstream literature, how do you see “genres” reacting in years to come? Is it a good thing? I read your opinion that it might be the small genre groups trying to clutch their ownership of the very genres they claim to want to expand that is in jeopardy…I find this idea fascinating, and that it rings very true. I’m hoping you’ll expand on it.

BEAR: Oh, sure. I think genre has pretty much busted its boundaries–or at least the more accessible levels of genre have. What remains the core is what I think of as the club scene–there’s this stuff that is really inaccessible unless you have been steeped in the genre
conventions for decades, the genre equivalent of experimental jazz. You have to know the subject to appreciate that stuff: otherwise, it’s just noise.

But that experimental work is important for driving the other rings–let’s call them gears–of genre. And each of those, while it’s further and further from the engine of innovation, casts a wider shadow. But it’s all part of the same system.

However, there’s a certain set of voices in the critical circuit who bemoan the existence of that innovative, hothouse club scene core, and there’s another set who decry the fact that there are people intentionally trying to write SFF that any guy off the street can pick up and read without 65 years of backstory and in-crowd references. Because the latter is really insular, and for most people, you can’t get there from here.

We need it. But the cutting edge is not the only important part of a knife.

DBJ: You have a very honest, front-end-attack style when confronting social issues in your writing. Is there a trigger that sets you off? Is there a way to tell when something about books, or movies, or TV, or life in general is reaching the critical mass point that will inspire you to react in words? Is there any such reaction-inducing trigger imminent that you’d like to discuss?

BEAR: Funny you should ask. I’m currently looking for my next thing to get mad about, because I’m supposed to be writing a book right now and I haven’t quite got it figured out and assembled into a machine in my head yet. (When I refer to my books as machines, I mean sort of kludgy Steampunk machines with any number of garnet bearings and polished brass pistons in there churning away, doing their thing.) I think it may be something to do with heroism, and the heroism of doing the scutwork that never turns up in epics.

I try never to be didactic in my books, but I do like to point out things that people may not have considered, because they aren’t part of our primary cultural narrative.

It’s as often a work of art that sets me off as the real world. In some ways, _Undertow_ was a reaction to the unexamined colonialism in H. Beam Piper’s _Little Fuzzy_, except Ursula K. LeGuin had already written that story (”The Word for World is Forest”) so I had to come
at it from a different direction.

DBJ: Everyone always asks what you have upcoming in these interviews, but I’m going to change it up a little. Of the things you are currently working on, or soon to work on, what project excites you the most? If there’s no set answer to that, what are the projects coming up and what is different among them that inspires you? You work in a variety of universes andcross-genre mashups…is the feeling the same working in each, or are they unique experiences?

BEAR: Oh, they’re all different. Which is why I do it: I get bored very easily with repetition, and this job doesn’t pay enough to be bored by.

The thing that is consuming my head right now is a hyperfictionproject I’m involved with with Emma Bull, Sarah Monette, Will Shetterly, and Amanda Downum. It’s called Shadow Unit (www.shadowunit.org) and while we jokingly refer to it as fanfiction for a TV show that doesn’t exist, that’s kind of a wry misnomer. It’s an enormous project, comprising fiction, interactive character blogs, art, occasional puzzles, hypertext… I’m thrilled to be a part of it. I’ve been describing it as the sort of story where a close-knit group of unrealistically sexy smart people save the world from the worst monsters imaginable. Or die trying. (Bwahahahahahah.)

In addition, I have the Promethean Age books ongoing, which is also kind of an enormous project. Two more, set in Elizabethan England and featuring a trio of indigent playwrights by the names of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Jonson, are being published this summer by Roc.

I’ve also got the Jacob’s Ladder trilogy ongoing for Bantam Spectra–the book I’m trying to get a mad up for right now is #2 in the series, _Chill._ The first one seems to be doing very well.

And last but not least, a periapocalyptic Norse fantasy series is starting from Tor this fall, with a book called _All the Windwracked Stars._ I’m thrilled with how that book came out, and I hope everybody else likes it half as much as I do.

DBJ: Final question - and I ask this of all interviewees. You have one day to come up with the inspiration for a new novel. You have your choice of spending it in a library of all the world’s books - in a studio with all the world’s music available to you, or a car to take you one place in the world to spend the day. What do you choose, and why?

BEAR: The car, absolutely. There’s no substitute for the real world, and close observation in art. Stuff you can taste and smell and thump with your hand–or the simulation of it.

DBJ: But where would the car take you, and why?

BEAR: I have no idea how to answer the question. Hmm. Depends on what I’m writing about, doesn’t it? And where it’s set?

DBJ: We’ll check back in a few weeks and see where it took you.

THANKS!