All stories are sci-fi, all by Elizabeth Bear (see her Wikipedia page). Each is notated with year written (if known), book that includes it (when relevant), online location (if available), and date of review.
Covenant
★★★★ (of 5)
2014, The Best Of Elizabeth Bear (2020),
online
version (Slate)
review: 2020.02.01
A finalist for the 2015 Locus Award for best short story, Covenant is a first-person thriller told from the viewpoint of a former serial killer who has been “rightminded” — undergone surgical and chemical changes to cure psychopathy. Bear packs a lot of information and tension into a handful of pages.
Lest We Forget
★★ (of 5)
N/A,
online version (Uncanny)
review: 2019.11.08
This very short story (took about 10 minutes to read) wasn’t as powerful for me as other Bear stories. First, I thought it was an article or op-ed in the online magazine (because the URL uses the directory “/article/”) and it just seemed like an anti-war screed. Which is fine. But then it became clearer it was fiction and the story was nearly over. I had a hard time grasping the details — I think I was supposed to assume some things from hints in the text, but I’m often fairly bad at making the right assumptions from hints (in speech as well as in text).
So I think it’s about a remote pilot for military drones who lets memory-storing flatworms eat her brain so they (the flatworms) can pass those memories onto others in an attempt to end war or something.
A Time To Reap
★★★★ (of 5)
2019,
online version (Uncanny)
review: 2019.11.06
This time-travel novella is about a young actress starring in a theater remake of a popular video game, which was itself based on a 50-year-old real-life crime story — you guessed it, the very time that the actress travels back to. Yes, an unusual premise.
I was distracted by a multitude if editing oversights like missing words, a “that” instead of “than”, and so on. Still, the story was riveting. Very well done. There were — as expected in a time travel story — several side comments about the past, in this case from the perspective of the teenager from 2028. Few were relevant to the plot, but each brought a knowing grin from me (because, although I’m closer now to 2028 than to 1978, I’ve actually been to 1978 in my time travels). I think my favorite non-plot-related passage was this:
“Meeting one Abbott after another... I realized what made them such a weird-looking family. What had been bothering me on the way up the stairs.
“Every last one of them was white. The whole family.
“The past really is a different country.”
Perfect Gun
★★★★ (of 5)
2019, Infinity Wars,
online version (Clarkesworld)
review: 2019.11.04
I came to this short story via a tweeted link from the author. It’s a tale of an ex-soldier and the decommissioned war machine he bought.
As with other Bear works, the style is concise and clear; the reader is rarely left lacking understanding of what’s happening. This one is a first-person narrative, from the point of view of a self-serving former space soldier turned mercenary. Some of the characters are given physical descriptions, but oddly enough the war machine is never well described (the narrator variously refers to it as a “gun” and a “mech”, but it’s also capable of space travel and atmospheric flight, and is large enough for the narrator to live in). It’s one of those rare stories where you don’t empathize with the main character because you’re not supposed to, and Bear handled this well.
Perhaps not Bear’s best work, but it’s short, tangible, and satisfying.
No Moon And Flat Calm
Art by Lisa Larson-Walker.
★★★★ (of 5)
2019,
online version (Slate)
review: 2019.05.25
This was my first-ever experience with Elizabeth Bear, published as part of Slate’s “Future Tense” series. It examines what a disaster in space might look like. At the time of this review, it’s not listed among Elizabeth Bear’s works, either on Wikipedia or Goodreads.
The style my favorite kind: concise and clear, cut and dried. (In my opinion, too many short stories leave the reader grasping unsuccesfully for what’s happening.) The few characters — just five of them — aren’t well developed, lacking all description, only named in order to clarify dialog. The best part is that the tension builds quickly; the author expertly guides the reader from perfect calm to slight worry and then to all-out panic just at the right points. It’s well done in most aspects and makes interesting points about disaster preparedness.
For me, the only downsides are the complete lack of both world-building and character development, though I recognize that these lacks keep the story short and brisk.
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