Elizabeth Bear

Sarah Bear Elizabeth Wishnevsky (born September 22, 1971) is an American author who works primarily in speculative fiction genres, writing under the name Elizabeth Bear.

Bear in 2011

Quotes

Short fiction

See Elizabeth Bear's Internet Science Fiction Database page for original publication details

The Hand is Quicker— (2014)

• The world is full of the markers of abandoned empires, from Hadrian’s Wall to the Great Wall of China, from the remnants of the one in Arizona to the remnants of the one in Berlin.
  • Reprinted in Rich Horton (ed.), The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015 (p. 430)

Deriving Life (2019)

Reprinted in Neil Clarke (ed.), The Best Science Fiction of the Year Volume 5

• Can you imagine a planet full of assholes who used to just…cut down trees?
  • p. 124 (ellipsis in the original)

• I said, “It just seems weird that I’m in bed with somebody I’ve never met.”
  As I said it I realized how foolish it was. Anytime you’re in bed with somebody, you’re in bed with everybody who came before you—everybody who hurt them, healed them, shaped them. All those ghosts are in the room.
  • p. 132

• Depression is realism.
  • p. 134

• We need what we need. Judging ourselves doesn’t change it. Sometimes a hug and a cookie right now mean more than a grand gesture at some indeterminate point in the future.
  • p. 136

Carnival (2006)

All page numbers are from the mass market paperback first edition published by Bantam Spectra ISBN 0-553-58904-0

Nominated for the 2006 Philip K. Dick Award

Italics as in the book

• “Kill or be killed,” Vincent said, next best thing to a mantra.
  • Chapter 1 (p. 5)

• There were idiots on every planet who considered possession more important than morality.
  • Chapter 3 (p. 56)

• Kusanagi-Jones was long past feeling guilt about lying. Conscience was one of the first things to go. If he’d ever had much of one to begin with, the job had burned it out.
  • Chapter 6 (p. 95)

• Any government founded on a political or religious agenda more elaborate than “protect the weak, temper the strong” is doomed to tyranny.
  • Chapter 7 (p. 116)

• Strike two for Utopia. The problem with the damned things always comes when you try to introduce actual people into your philosophical constructs.
  • Chapter 7 (p. 123)

• “Hypocrite,” she said. But she laughed. “Doesn’t it get tiring being so damned morally superior all the time?”
  • Chapter 8 (p. 133)

• He wouldn’t be much of a diplomat if he couldn’t lie with a straight face.
  • Chapter 18 (p. 272)

• “You ever needed to disprove the existence of a Creator God,” he said, “the miracle of efficiency that the human body isn’t would be a fucking good place to start.”
  • Chapter 19 (p. 291)

• “Cultural hegemony is based on conformity,” he said, after a pause long enough that she had expected to go unanswered. “Siege mentality. Look at oppressed philosophies, religions—or religions that cast themselves as oppressed to encourage that kind of defensiveness. Logic has no pull. What the lizard brain wants, the monkey brain justifies, and when things are scary, anything different is the enemy. Can come up with a hundred pseudological reasons why, but they all boil down to one thing: if you aren’t one of us, you’re one of them.”
  • Chapter 22 (p. 341)