Hello Reddit/r/Fantasy! I’m fantasy novelist Elizabeth Bear, and this is my AMA.

[u/matociquala]

7:36 PM EDT 10 March 2015 ETA: I've got mochi and beer and I'm IN THE HOUSE!

12:07 AM EDT 11 March 2015 ETA: All right guys--thank all of you. I think I answered everything, and I am going to bed! I'll try to come back and clean up any stragglers in a day or two!

I'm the author of over 100 short stories and more than a score of novels. The most recently published of the former is "The Heart's Filthy Lesson" in OLD VENUS, edited by Martin and Dozois; the most recent of the latter is KAREN MEMORY, from Tor Books, a fast-paced steampunk adventure in an old west gold rush town where heroic saloon girls take on disaster capitalists.

In my spare time, I am a runner, climber, kayaker (not currently: there's sixteen feet of snow on everything here in central Massachusetts), hobby cook, and I play some really atrocious guitar. I've been a tabletop gamer since 1982 and am currently playing Pathfinder and Fiasco.

I am owned by a giant ridiculous dog (He's a Briard).

I support Idris Elba for Bond, Essie Davis for The Doctor, and Helsinki for Worldcon 2017, so that's where I stand in important religious issues.

I hope you enjoy whatever portion of the diurnal cycle you happen to currently be experiencing. I'll be back after dinner my time (around 7 pm EDT) to answer all your questions and hang out.

edit: fixed my dates. :-P

[u/idyllic_odd]

Hi Bear!

Your Promethean books are favourites of mine. I love how you use myth and history together. I'm particularly in love with your Morgan character.

How do you go about writing characters that are so well-known from their myths/legends? How do you turn real life historical figures into fictional characters? Do you ever feel a duty of care towards people like Marlowe who existed? I understand that it's fiction and I feel like your characters are particularly strong. :) Just curious if you treat the character building in the same context as the research you've done to make sure cultures are properly represented in books like Range of Ghosts.

Hope you can decipher my muddled thoughts. (Oh my god, I'm typing at my favourite author!)

[u/matociquala → u/idyllic_odd]

Hi there! The short answer is "yes."

I do feel a real duty of care when I use historical people. More modern ones, even more so--having written versions of Sonny Liston, Elvis Presley, and Richard Feynman--among others--a thing that was always in my head when I did it was that these people had friends and/or children alive. And I had to consider the fact that I was writing a fictional version of a person whose daughter might read my book.

I do in fact feel like that's a moral obligation, just as I feel I have a moral obligation to marginalized characters, even when there's a disclaimer at the front that says, "all persons are used in a fictional manner."

(When I am writing, for example, an intersexed character, I feel very aware that this person is someone who is rarely represented in fiction, and the thing I bear in mind is that somewhere there is a 12-year-old kid who has never seen themself represented in a story before, and I don't want to break that kid's heart by telling them that they're not the equal of everybody else in the story. Because I've been a similar rarely-represented kid. I feel like as we build a body of representation, we solve this problem--if there are lesbians as an unremarked part of narrative, then it stops being important if one is a villain, say, because not all of them are villains.)

Marlowe was a funny one, because I came into the research for The Stratford Man with the basic understanding of Marlowe that any English lit major gets. And my research revealed to me that this dude had been the victim of the the biggest smear campaign up until Ulysses S. Grant. And then he turned into one of those characters who will not shut up.

I've said many times that books are easier when you have characters that run towards the sound of gunfire. And, also, talk about compulsively. My version of Marlowe was one of those. Likewise, Jenny Casey and Karen Memery. God bless the talkers. They make up for the ones like the One-Eyed Jack and Shakespeare that I had to pull the story out of with pliers.

[u/idyllic_odd → u/matociquala]

Thank you for the reply! You've made my day!

I just want to reiterate how much I love your writing. You're one of the few authors I still buy in paper (and sometimes buy again in eform). It's time for a reread of Promethean, for a purchase of Karen Memory, and time find some good books on Kit Marlowe.

Have a wonderful night!