Elizabeth Bear is one of the genre’s most respected and prolific authors. She won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer for 2005, as well as the Locus Award in the same year for Best First Novel—even though the “book” she won for was really her whole first trilogy: Hammered, Scardown, and Worldwired. This is a series near and dear to my heart not only because it kicked serious ass, but also because it not only featured a fractured America and the subsequent space-race between Canada and China—and I had just married a Canadian—but also because, over the course of the series, she managed to kill more people than any other author I have ever worked with…and I work with George R.R. Martin! Over 20 million down over the course of one book; hats off to you, Bear!
In the subsequent six years, Bear has published books with many different houses—as well as innumerable pieces of short fiction—but of her Spectra novels, Carnival was the runner-up for the Philip K. Dick Award for Best Novel in 2006, and was also nominated for the Lambda Literary Award for Best SF Novel in 2006 as well. And Dust was nominated for the 2007 Philip K. Dick Award, and was also a Romantic Times Reviewers Choice Nominee for Best Science Fiction Novel in 2008 (read a great excerpt of Dust here). And if that is not a telling diversity, I don’t know what is!
And as of February 22nd, with the release of Grail, she just completed her second trilogy and eighth novel for us. So both to celebrate the conclusion of the trilogy, and the occasion of her third PKD nod—the middle novel of the trilogy, Chill, is on the short-list for the 2010 Award—I decided to ask Bear a few questions about her latest trilogy.
Anne Groell: This series was initially pitched to me as Gormenghast meets Upstairs, Downstairs, in space. (With, of course, the inevitable Roger Zelazny comparisons.) Were these some of your inspirations for the novel, and why? And what else inspired you?
Elizabeth Bear: Yes. I think the original proposal amounted to:
Amber:Gormenghast::Upstairs:Downstairs… in spaaaaaaaaaaaaaaace!
And that’s very evident in the first book, I think, which concerns itself heavily with class issues, and father-daughter issues, and this idea of what monsters are, and is there any difference between us and them. It’s also structured like a Gothic novel in some ways—it’s a love affair between a girl and an evil house.
I started off with the idea that wouldn’t it be wonderfully odd and fun to create a world in which I could play with concretized metaphors–actual trees of knowledge, blue blood indicating aristocracy–and in which I could also pull in all sorts of literary allusions and blend them together. The justification for all of this has to do with a society that started off as a religious cult, and has since been shepherded for five hundred years by a fragmented A.I.–and the part of the A.I. that’s in control started its existence as the ship’s library computer.
And the library computer is obsessed with Arthuriana, because (fairly obviously) one of the original ship’s officers must have been a fan of the Matter of Britain, so it had all that material to work with. Which means that that obsession gets projected onto the society, and there are knights-errant, and Sorceresses, and Necromancers, and so forth.
But really, the Necromancer is the person who keeps the library of memory-pattern recordings of the ship’s dead, and the Sorceress was the Chief of Bioengineering. And the Enemy–the Devil, if you will–is space itself, one of the most utterly inhospitable environments we can conceive of.
There are some very broad nods to Zelazny, whose books were a major influence on me. Also, I can clearly see influences from early John Varley (the shine off his Titan trilogy is all over these suckers), P.K. Dick, John Brunner, Joan D. Vinge, Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis books…
AG: What, specifically, drew you to space opera and the idea of the generation ship?
EB: It’s such a great idea, isn’t it? It allows you to play all kinds of social games, because your people are of necessity going to be totally isolated from their mother cultures, after a while. The evil house thing was part of it–what if your Gothic House is the whole world, and you literally cannot escape it?
Sometimes people mistake the Jacob’s Ladder for fantasy with science fiction elements, and they’re really not. They’re SF done up in fantasy tropes, which is structurally quite different. (My original goal had been to do each of the three books as a different fantasy novel plot structure–the quest novel, the political novel, the plot-coupon fantasy. It didn’t quite work out that way.)
I wanted to play some with the tropes of generation ships—there’s so frequently this idea that people left in space for some generations will have retreated to barbarism, lost their science, and so forth. I wanted the crippled ship, for reasons that would be too spoilery to reveal, but I also wanted a crew that–while Balkanized–was also very aware that they were the crew of a space ship, and that they were supposed to be going somewhere.
I wanted a big, immediate, external threat, so I stuck them in orbit around an unstable binary star system, and I set the clock ticking.
I also liked the idea of a crosstown rivalry between Command and Engineering that had evolved into a sort of warring-nations deal over the years, so that also led me to the generation ships.
AG: As I read this series, one of the things that always impressed me most was the sheer exuberance of your ideas—especially as regards the technology on the ship. What led you down the path of the biological tech—trees as libraries, and fuzzy, cute critters as toolkits? Can you tell me a little about your thinking, here?
EB: I think each of the three books has a slightly different set of thematic concerns, but there are arcs that unite all three of them. In specific, there’s this argument that runs through all books about identity, what it is, whether it in fact exists at all. And I needed ways to play with that, so I had to have people with enough wet tech to be able to program memories and transfer personalities from one body to another. But of course, our current state of neuroscience suggests that a lot of personality is hard-coded in the wetware, as it were. We’re moving beyond this idea that our minds are something imposed on our body, Apollonian, separable. Uploadable, if you will. Instead, it’s becoming more and more evident that the meat has a profound influence on the mind.
And there’s this thing where, really, there is no such thing as objective truth. Or rather, there is, but the human mind is incapable of apprehending it. We filter reality heavily, and we create narratives out of bits of it by flatly ignoring others.
It’s an idea that P.K. Dick relied on in most of his work, and it’s one that fascinates me as well.
What exactly *is* a human being? What makes them? If we can’t step in the same river twice, is it not just because the river has changed, but so have we?
Some of it was plot necessity: I needed the tech to be contagious, because of a certain spacewalk sequence early on in Dust.
I actually typed “GONZO, DAMMIT!” into the header line of all three books when I was writing them, because I wanted big sweeping ideas and daring worldbuilding. If I thought of something awesome, I put it in, and either worked out a justification for it later or took it out. I didn’t know what the revenants were when I first mentioned them, or the ship cats. But eventually I figured it out, and so they stayed.
And there’s some stuff that was just too good to pass up. The reactor coolant leak reincarnated as a Djinn, for example.
Also, giving objects personalities tied into that question of identity. If your chair has a personality, has it stopped being a chair?
AG: In the books, you also—for all the advanced tech—reach heavily into the realm of myth and legend. This far-future society, for instance, is heavily influenced by ideas of chivalry and knight-errantry, and their AIS are known as “angels.” What made these almost fantasy trappings seem the perfect barding for something that is still very much a science fiction novel? And was it fun melding those genres, or was there a tension between them that you needed to resolve?
EB: It was fun, and there was tension. As I said above, the fantasy trappings outgrow from the Arthurian fantasies of the ship’s A.I., and this trope of a world gone feudal in its decay. Also, when you think of it, a ship’s captain is not unlike a king–an unquestioned authority, and as the king is identified with the kingdom, the captain is identified with the ship. King and Captain both serve as personifications of their realms.
But I always kept it in mind that I was writing science fiction novels, that the purpose of these books was to set up a bunch of questions and critique them and their base assumptions. Well, and to tell a good story about some neat characters. The tricky bit was keeping everything at least plausibly superscientific. It was Clarke who said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, after all. When you’ve reached the point where you have nanotech that can repair almost any physical damage–but can’t repair an obliterated brain–and genetic engineering that can create a laser-eyed cockatrice (he’s called a basilisk in the series, which is technically an incorrect usage–although cockatrice is, too, since he’s not rooster-headed but hawk-headed) you’re pretty far along in that direction.
AG: Despite telling one big overall story, each of the books in the trilogy in many ways stands alone, telling the tale of a discrete moment in the life of the generation ship, with gaps of decades between the novels. Did you deliberately set out to write the books this way, or did that evolve more naturally from the exigencies of the actual story-telling?
EB: The first two books are pretty tightly integrated. The third takes place much later–and yes, I knew going in I was going to have to do it that way. I would have preferred a tight continuity all through… but the problem with generation ships is that they take forever to get anywhere.
I definitely cheated a little on the time between Chill and Dust. It should have been centuries, but I didn’t want to come up with that many years of politics.
AG: Thanks, Bear, and good luck on April 22nd! We here at Spectra are keeping our fingers crossed for that PKD win.
EB: Thank you! I’m thrilled to be included!
Grail is on sale now. To learn more about the book, click here.
The giveaway has now ended. Thanks to all who entered! If you’re a winner, you’ll hear from Suvudu shortly.
