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Elizabeth Bear is an American author from Hartford Connecticut who has written numerous novel in several sub genres in fantasy. Sharing a birthday with Bilbo Baggins and Frodo and a love for reading the dictionary, the young Bear was doomed to early friendlessness, intransigence, penury, and a penchant for penning speculative fiction. With the exception of two years when she lived in the Northeast Kingdom in Vermont, Elizabeth for the most part grew up in central Connecticut in what is famously the last house connected to the grid before you reach the Canadian border. She is a third generation Transylvanian, a third generation Ukrainian, and second generation Swede with German, Cherokee, Scot, English, and Irish roots. Through her two-decade long career, she has been the recipient of the Best First Novel at the Locus Awards, the Sturgeon Award, a Best New Writer John W. Campbell Award, and two Hugo Awards. She has written the Iskryne series with Sarah Monette, the Edda of Burdens series, and the critically acclaimed Eternal Sky series. She attended the University of Connecticut where she studied Anthropology and English, but dropped out without ever graduating. Before she became a writer, she worked as a reporter, a stable hand, and technical writer. Even though she sold several of her first stories to several small magazines in the 1990s, she began seriously considering a career in writing in 2001. After the publication of her first novel “Hammered” to rave reviews and much commercial success, she has never looked back producing numerous short stories and novels since. She currently resides in Brookfield, Massachusetts.
Elizabeth bear is one of the most prolific of writers and with her career just about to surpass its ten-year mark, she has published a mosaic novel in the Amsterdam series, two collections of short stories, three novellas, twenty solo novels, and a trilogy she wrote in collaboration with Sarah Monette. In spite of publishing so many novels over the years, Bear is not slowing down as she keeps churning out even more novels. What makes Bear such a special writer is that her writing is not constrained to one genre. Her prolific habits have seen her change styles, jump sub-genres from series to series and from book to book with success. From spy series, steampunk, epic fantasy, fantasy, and science fiction, Elizabeth has it all. Her best-known work is the Jenny Casey Trilogy, that is a series of military or police science fiction procedurals set in a twenty-first century urban setting. Her protagonist in the series is a female ex-military special agent that carries up so much hardware that calling her a cyborg would not be so far off the mark. The America in which her protagonist lives and works as a private enforcer is controlled by a radical Christian government. Bear melancholically depicts the actions of the fundamentalist government, though the appearance of Richard Feynman, the 20th century physicist who is resurrected by being inserted into an AI lifts spirits to some extent. Things move to Canada and into space toward the end of the volume, though the sharply likable, slangy, and tough-minded protagonists still feature in the now extensive interstellar setting.
Since the publication of her trilogy, Elizabeth Bear has shifted gears to write series, most of which have been fantasies such as New Amsterdam, the Eternal Sky Trilogy, The Promethean Age saga, The Stratford Man Duology, and The Iskryne series. The Edda of Burdens series is a combination of fantasy and science fiction that are set in ancient mythological fantasy settings. As for her science fantasy, Bear writes of sequences set in the far future that explain the fate of the world including the desolation that has befallen planet earth. In her more marginal science fiction novels such as Jacob’s Ladder series extends the settings of the far future settings that is something akin to the movie Avatar. With science fiction like explanations of the tale of a wrecked ship orbiting a strange star, the author tells a story of avatars inside a ship using ruthless shock effects. If you prefer novels to short fiction, the Jenny Casey Trilogy would be best, with their fantastic characters, technological arms race, and high body counts. For the science fiction fan, the Jacobs Ladder trilogy with its narratives of biological, social, survival and conflicted family loyalties make for enthralling reads. Regardless of whether you prefer Steampunk, Historical, Epic or fantasy you can start anywhere with Elizabeth’s works and be sure to find something that will blow your mind.
“Hammered”, the first novel in the Jenny Casey series of novels introduces the lead character in the series Jenny Casey, a former Canadian Special Forces soldier. She is now living on the tough streets of Hartford Connecticut in the futuristic 2062. The fifty-year-old Jenny is running and hiding from the Canadian government she was once part of. She runs with a crime lord who she believes will be of great help in fighting against the tyranny of the government. Jenny has a problem, her artificial body is disintegrating, and the solution is unthinkable. A government scientist has never forgotten her. He believes she would be the perfect subject for a critical project to save the world that he is conducting. The protagonist now finds herself the pawn in a cutthroat battle on the streets of ruined cities, on the walkways if the Internet, and in the intricate wirings of her half machine half human nervous system. To prevent things from spiraling out of control she needs to regain control of her life before her detractors catch up to her.
“Scardown”, the second novel in the Jenny Casey series sees Jenny back in the Canadian military after running for years. The people that she once thought of as enemies have been turned into allies. At fifty years old, she has accepted one of the most critical missions in her life as she has agreed to let the government scientists reconstruct her artificial body. With the world in which she lives about to become uninhabitable in the next century, Jenny’s transformation into a super soldier and captain of the Montreal Starship is the only hope that humanity has of discovering new worlds. Jenny finds herself embroiled in a desperate battle full of brutal justice and bitter betrayals that result in the cruelest of vengeance. With the crime lord turned AI by her side, Jenny may just save the earth.
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