What We Talk About When We Talk About Bear (II)
So here I am in the lovely northeast, staying with the lovely girlfriend for a few weeks. Duty and Anxiety have collaborated on a performance piece called "Let's Fuck Up Scott's Desire to Post to His LJ," but tonight I'm shuffling those two anthropomorphized concepts off the stage and getting posty with it.
I wanted to unroll a little bit more about Elizabeth Bear's work in relation to Range of Ghosts, with an observation about her stuff in general:
One of the most telling things about an author's body of work is where their gaze keeps settling. Bear chooses time and time again to peer closely at characters devoid of traditional sympathy or empathy flags, characters that other authors might deploy because of their intrinsic inhumanity. Whether it's a battered, abandoned war-mecha ("Tideline") or a put-upon sex android ("Dolly") or a starport grafitti artist ("Two Dreams on Trains") or a goddamn Shoggoth (!)("Shoggoths in Bloom") or any of the myriad characters that have crawled, broken but unbowed, across the starships, cityscapes, and theatre stages of her prodigious stack of novels, Bear keeps an illuminating eye firmly on the ostensibly unsympathetic.
From these easy-to-stereotype types she constantly dredges telling quirks and peels open inner lives. Bear doesn't much use the traditional trappings of mammalian cuteness to signal to her audience that it's okay to feel for something. There are no cute chirpy robots in her worlds, no wisecracking sidekicks, nobody singled out to wear one emotional stripe forever. In the Elizabeth Bear version of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace Jar-Jar Binks wouldn't flail and shit-step and pratfall his way across the narrative; it goes without saying that he wouldn't be a half-witted pixellated Rastus figure, either. In fact, I am now ensnared in a tangent, and desperately sorry that the world will never see that movie as Bear might have written it.
Bear pries secrets and desires out of the unlikeliest places; she reflexively invests her creations with agency the way too many authors habitually rub it out. Agency, by the way, is not a synonym for political authority or combat prowess or physical strength or social sanction within a narrative. Agency means that an author recognizes and respects that each character has motivation, wants, and an inner landscape; it means treating them as something more than props and puppets. It means writing them as though their hearts and heads have actual contents deserving of examination. The ability to swing swords and wear crowns and command ships has nothing to do with it.
Bear gets this, with rare style and intensity. Everywhere she looks, even inside thick shells of cliche and cold bodies of metal, she finds people. This is an important thing to keep in mind when diving into Range of Ghosts...
To be continued!
I wanted to unroll a little bit more about Elizabeth Bear's work in relation to Range of Ghosts, with an observation about her stuff in general:
One of the most telling things about an author's body of work is where their gaze keeps settling. Bear chooses time and time again to peer closely at characters devoid of traditional sympathy or empathy flags, characters that other authors might deploy because of their intrinsic inhumanity. Whether it's a battered, abandoned war-mecha ("Tideline") or a put-upon sex android ("Dolly") or a starport grafitti artist ("Two Dreams on Trains") or a goddamn Shoggoth (!)("Shoggoths in Bloom") or any of the myriad characters that have crawled, broken but unbowed, across the starships, cityscapes, and theatre stages of her prodigious stack of novels, Bear keeps an illuminating eye firmly on the ostensibly unsympathetic.
From these easy-to-stereotype types she constantly dredges telling quirks and peels open inner lives. Bear doesn't much use the traditional trappings of mammalian cuteness to signal to her audience that it's okay to feel for something. There are no cute chirpy robots in her worlds, no wisecracking sidekicks, nobody singled out to wear one emotional stripe forever. In the Elizabeth Bear version of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace Jar-Jar Binks wouldn't flail and shit-step and pratfall his way across the narrative; it goes without saying that he wouldn't be a half-witted pixellated Rastus figure, either. In fact, I am now ensnared in a tangent, and desperately sorry that the world will never see that movie as Bear might have written it.
Bear pries secrets and desires out of the unlikeliest places; she reflexively invests her creations with agency the way too many authors habitually rub it out. Agency, by the way, is not a synonym for political authority or combat prowess or physical strength or social sanction within a narrative. Agency means that an author recognizes and respects that each character has motivation, wants, and an inner landscape; it means treating them as something more than props and puppets. It means writing them as though their hearts and heads have actual contents deserving of examination. The ability to swing swords and wear crowns and command ships has nothing to do with it.
Bear gets this, with rare style and intensity. Everywhere she looks, even inside thick shells of cliche and cold bodies of metal, she finds people. This is an important thing to keep in mind when diving into Range of Ghosts...
To be continued!
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