Xenagia: Xenagia Interviews #1: Elizabeth Bear

Xenagia Interviews #1: Elizabeth Bear

Elizabeth Bear likes to thank Al-Qaeda for her writing career. After an unsuccessful foray into publishing in the mid-1990s, she had all but given up writing and was working for a media company in Las Vegas, Nevada, in 2001 when the September 11th attacks took place. “What people don’t realize is that most of the people who come to Las Vegas fly to get there,” she says, explaining how the travel and economic slow-downs in the wake of the attacks led to her ending up in the unemployment lines.

“There’s only so much Montel you can watch,” Bear says. “I started take the dogs to the dog park every day, but I had to stop…the dogs were starting to get territorial because we were there so often.”

Faced with so much time on her hands, Bear decided to take the plunge and began working on her novel again, sometimes spending 10, 12 or 14 hours a day writing. At the same time, she joined the Online Writers Workshop, a network of writers offering criticism and support to one another, where she was able to connect with writers of similar experience.

“It’s essential,” she says, “to have a coterie of writers at about the same skill level as you. If you’re more advanced then everyone you interact with, then they have nothing to teach you. If everyone is more advanced then you, you have nothing to offer in return.”

The combination of teamwork and determination paid off: in 2003 Bear sold her fourth completed novel, Hammered, to Bantam Spectra. Since then, she’s published 12 novels, two short story collections, and won numerous awards and nominations including the John W. Campbell for Best New Writer, the Locus Prize for Best First Novel, the Sturgeon Award, and the Hugo Award (for her 2008 story “Tideline”).

Since her work cross so many genres and sub-genres—space opera, fantasy, cyberpunk, military SF, alternate (or secret) history—it can be hard to categorize her writing. “I am bad at sticking to a subgenre; I’d have more success if I were better at it, if I could write the same thing over and over.”

Still, the same themes and “literary kinks” do tend to resonate throughout her stories. “I’m really into—someone once said that New England writers are distinct in writing comedies of ethics… I’m always writing books about people having to make morally ambiguous choices with not enough information. I’m fascinated by these choices; life is full of them.”

She also likens her work, thematically, to that of Roger Zelazny, who she credits as a great influence. “It’s been pointed out that my work is very Zelazny-esque. He’s a brilliant wordsmith and I’m not arrogant enough to compare myself to him. But things he writes about are similar to things that I tend to write about—characters who are outsiders, supernatural beings navigating a mundane world. My characters are not Joe Average—they are alien, other, not like everyone else around them.”

Other influences include writers Pamela Dean and Emma Bull. “They are the first who revealed to me that it was possible to write fairy tales, but have them in the real world. I’ve already apologized to them for all the fan fiction…”

“We all start off as fans,” she says, speaking of interacting on a professional level with the writers who she admired and imitated when she was just starting out. “We’re all interested in the genre, we come in fascinated by it. We then find ourselves working with these people suddenly, and that’s just really…cool! But when you meet them you have to deconstruct them; somewhere under the auctorial construct we discover there is a real person who may not be like that at all. We have to defictionalize them.”

Recently, Bear has had the opportunity to work with some of her favorite fellow writers on the shared Internet fiction project, Shadow Unit. “It’s the most awesome thing I’ve ever been involved in,” says Bear, of the project that is the brainchild of Emma Bull, and features contributions from authors Will Shetterly, Sarah Monette, Amanda Downnum, Leah Bobet, and Holly Black. “There’s a quarter of a million words online for free; we’re talking professional quality writing here.”

The project is based on the idea of a virtual season—a collaborative fan fiction project that compiles stories and scripts into a cohesive new “season” for a cancelled series. The catch with Shadow Unit—which Bear describes as 1 part X-Files, 1 part Millenium, and 1 part The Wire or Criminal Minds—is that the original show never existed. Based on the concept of the series (“Eight unrealistically sexy FBI agents out to save the world from the anomaly that makes serial killers with paranormal powers.”) maybe it should have been.

Currently, Bear is between novels, having just turned in the manuscript for Chill, the second book of her Jacob’s Ladder trilogy (which Bear describes on her Web site as, "Amber:Gormenghast::Upstairs:Downstairs, in SPAAAAAAAAAACE!"). By the Mountain Bound, the sequel to 2008’s All the Windracked Stars is due out from Tor in October of this year: it’s an apocalyptic story with a steampunk flavor and overtones of Norse mythology. She’s also working on revisions and edits of the fifth book in her Promethean Age saga—an urban and historical fantasy series which has just been dropped by its previous publisher, thanks to the economic turmoil of recent months.

Does she worry what the current economic gloom might do to her career? “I’ve been known to peruse the classifieds. But anyone working in the entertainment industry is living by their wits. You go job to job, never knowing when your next paycheck is going to come from. I’ve got two sets of contracts right now, from Spectra and Tor; it’s not enough to live on, and I need more work, but at least I know I’m employed through 2011.” Which gives us plenty to look forward to in the next two years!