chris_gerrib | Happy Thanksgiving

I'm heading down to "Southern Illinois"* for Turkey Day, so no blog tomorrow. (Driving, and I plan to be on the road well before Teh Crazees hit it.) In the interest of giving you something to read, if not a start on your Christmas shopping list, let's talk about Elizabeth Bear.

She's an up-and-coming science fiction and fantasy writer, who will be Literary Guest of Honor at my local SF con, duckon in June. I've read four of her books, and can recommend them all.

The first book of elizabeth's I've read was Carnival. This is a stand-alone SF novel, set in a world where terrorists have gotten control of nanotechnology and used it to cull 9/10ths of humanity, in the name of preserving Earth's ecology. It's an interesting book, dense but well-paced.

This led me to her "Jenny Casey" series, which was her debut. There are three books, Hammered, Scardown and Worldwired.

The stories all star Jenny Casey, a former Canadian Army Warrant Officer with an artificial arm. The story starts with Hammered, which takes place in Hartford, Connecticut in 2063. Global warming has knocked the world into a handbasket, and Jenny spent some time there as a peacekeeper, then retired. She's got a set of problems which end up with her getting involved with an starship built with alien technology. The story is continued, in a fashion both interesting and exciting, in Scardown and concludes in Worldwired.

Elizabeth also writes fantasy. Her New Amsterdam book takes place in an alternate reality New York City of 1900 or so, and stars vampires, magic and some very interesting politics. I haven't read the book, but Subterranean Press ran a short story set in that world in one of their magazines.

All in all, I'm looking forward to meeting Ms. Bear at Duckon.

* actually, Central Illinois, near Champaign. However, Chicagoans regard anything south of I-80 as "Southern Illinois" and assume that we're down there drinkin' moonshine an' pluckin' banjos.