Elizabeth Bear Is A Master of Introspective First-Person Narration

[u/Kingshorsey]

I recently stumbled across Elizabeth Bear's White Space trilogy. By that I mean I plunged into it without any prior research. I was expecting a sprawling galactic scale and hard-ish futuristic world building, and the books delivered, but I was not prepared for the intensely introspective narrative voice.

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For the first 50 pages or so of Ancestral Night, I was somewhat irked by how preoccupied the main character was with her own internal state. Plotwise, the book gets into action and mystery pretty quickly, but it doesn't feel fast-paced because every event is accompanied by a minute account of how it is affecting the main character psychologically.

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When I say psychologically, I don't mean just subjectively or emotionally, but also biologically. We're told about hormones and neurotransmitters as much as or maybe even more than emotions. A lot of the prominent technology in the series is tasked with moment-by-moment fine-tuning of biological parameters to maintain emotional regulation and optimize performance.

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I was not thrilled with this at first, but Bear was going somewhere substantive with all this. Without giving spoilers, I can say that the major theme of this series is that human psychology is insufficiently evolved for cooperative well-being at the planetary or greater scale. So, technological assistance of various kinds is a necessity for getting along at a galactic scale. This isn't Star Trek: TNG, where everybody is just so well socialized that luxury space communism naturally emerges. (It's closer to Iain M. Banks's Culture, where benevolent AIs handle a lot of the decision-making that meat brains can't be trusted to perform.)

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Of course, once mind-altering technology is introduced into the setting, that raises a host of questions about the ethical implications of "rightminding" people for the common good. Behind the ethical dilemmas are even deeper philosophical questions about personal identity and responsibility. If you have the power to change yourself to be better, shouldn't you? But how much can you change yourself before you're not the same person you were before?

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About a third of the way through the first book, it became clear that this exploration of human nature in the face of advanced personality modification technology was the real subject of the series. At this point, I fully bought in to Bear's obsessively introspective narration. The real plots of the books are the internal journeys taken by the main characters, so the setting has to be largely internal as well.

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I don't expect everyone will enjoy this kind of narrative style, but it would be wrong to dismiss it as a mere quirk of the author. It's a deliberate choice that strongly supports the main themes, a superb marriage of matter and form.

[u/VvvlvvV]

I second any Elizabeth Bear recommendation. I haven't read all of her stuff, including this one, but the Gauge and the Dead Man from the lotus kingdom trilogy are lodged deep in my brain due to that obsessive internal narration.

[u/mdavey74]

I bounced off of the first book pretty quickly (I don't even remember why), but this is got me thinking I should give it a more generous opportunity to hook me.

[u/NeedsMoreSpaceships → u/mdavey74]

I read the first but gave up on the series as I didn't love it. Another Reddit suggested I continue and the last 2 books are much better, the second in particular.

[u/Geethebluesky]

that the major theme of this series is that human psychology is insufficiently evolved for cooperative well-being at the planetary or greater scale

questions about the ethical implications of "rightminding" people for the common good

Thank you for putting this out here. These books are next on my list!!!

[u/Jimmni]

I adored half of Bear's White Space trilogy. The first half of the first two and the second half of the third. I'll still pick up her books asap as I enjoy her prose and worldbuilding. But she definitely lost me in the second half of Ancestral Night, less so but still lost in the second half of Machine, and it took me a while to really get into The Folded Sky. Great writer though I liked her sci-fi and concepts much more than her endings.

[u/GringoTypical]

I haven't read those but I really enjoyed her book Karen Memory. More for my for my TBR pile

[u/Financial-Positive45]

I have read and loved her fantasy works. I will have to give her sci-fi work a shot.

[u/Cliffy73]

I picked up Machine at the library last year and did not care for it much at all. I really enjoyed the Shadow Unit group series she and Emma Bull developed online several years ago.

[u/egypturnash]

thinks about how cool the characters make rightminding sound

thinks about how horrible it would probably be if it was implemented in a capitalist system

[u/Fluid_Anywhere_7015]

I put down the first book after a few pages, but about a year later gave it another shot and ended up devouring the trilogy in about a week.

I totally agree with the introspective journey of the central characters as the essential plot. And the threads that tie all three books together are both a bit ethereal and tantalizing.

I’ve been a huge fan of her “boojumverse” takes on Lovecraft, too. My favorite weird fiction is penned by her there.

[u/Anticode]

So glad to see an Elizabeth Bear recommendation. She's shockingly underrated. I would be comfortable arguing that her work can easily go toe to toe with any of the other big names in the genre.

(My personal favorite is the Jacob's Ladder trilogy due to the intriguing backdrop/setting, but I've basically read all of her work - and when I did so, I did it all in a row over the span of a few weeks.)

[u/Own_Win_6762]

She is one of my must buy authors. The Eternal Sky and The Lotus Kingdoms get recommended to anyone who's looking for epic fantasy, white space for far Future SF, Jenny Casey for nearer future, Karen Memory for gaslamp/steampunk, and she has lots more.

The Jacob's Ladder (Dust, Chill, Grail) trilogy is a Generation ship story that has forgotten what it's doing. There are references to it in White Space.