This is a forthcoming collection of Elizabeth Bear’s short stories that I received as an ARC from Subterranean Press. So thanks to them for that.
My prior experience with Elizabeth Bear has been fairly small, relative to what she’s published. I’ve read Karen Memory and the sequel, about a woman working in a brothel in 19th century boomtown Seattle with a dash of the supernatural thrown in for fun, and Ancestral Night, first in an upcoming sci-fi series about a small crew in a future Federation-like galactic alliance. Both were excellent, and very, very different from each other.
Which leads me to the main thing I took away from this collection: my God, does Bear have range. Murder mysteries involving necromancers on 19th century steamboats. Aliens and time travelers in the Old West. Robin McKinley-esque fairy tales. Dragons. Vampires. Sentient spaceships. Shoggoths. It all works, and it all works very, very well.
A few themes emerge. The majority of these stories feature female protagonists, and all of them are super interesting characters. There’s pretty much nothing cliché about any of them, and when you have to sketch characters as quickly as you do in writing short stories, not leaning on established tropes is an impressive feat.
There are a number of murder mysteries, and while a short story doesn’t give time to really explore the mystery in the way you can with a good Agatha Christie, they nevertheless kept me guessing and caught me a bit off-guard with the answers.
There are a few stories with historical characters, notably Doc Holiday and boxer Sonny Liston. One story is set in a quiet New England seaside town, and explicitly in the universe of HP Lovecraft.
An idea that comes up repeatedly is the idea of “rightminding.” I was familiar with the idea already, because it’s a major theme in Ancestral Night, but it’s clear that Bear has been kicking this idea around for a while. The notion is that of a technology, implanted in the brain, that allows one to regulate one’s brain chemistry. With some matters, like people dealing with psychopathy or other mental illness, the benefits are obvious. And one can see the benefit of switching off one’s fear to deal with a frightening situation calmly, or turing off your sex drive if it’s getting in the way of rational decision making. But at some point, you’re turning off part of what it means to be human, and where that line is is far from clear. It’s an interesting sci-fi kind of question, and I’m curious to see where else Bear takes it.
All in all, this is a great way to get to know one of modern science fiction’s best and brightest. Like all good anthologies, you can read this all in one go or spread it out. But highly recommended either way.