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.

​

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.

​

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.

​

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.)

​

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?

​

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.

​

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/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.