Tag: Elizabeth Bear

Posted in Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (9/8/26) – The Folded Sky (White Space, #3)

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

I got hooked on Elizabeth Bear’s White Space series back in January. I figured I’d order The Folded Sky (on Bookshop.org of course…if you’re still ordering books on Amazon, go here instead!! Your money goes to indie bookstores and not Bezos!) with some leftover birthday money. Like all the other installations in this series, The Folded Sky did not disappoint.

NOTE: The Folded Sky is the third book in the White Space series, and while it doesn’t contain spoilers for books 1 and 2, it’s difficult to understand without the context that they give. For my reviews of the first two books, click below!

Enjoy this week’s review!

The Folded Sky (White Space, #3) – Elizabeth Bear

Dr. Sunyata Song was supposed to live a quiet life as a historian. Her studies of the Baomind—an ancient, moon-sized artificial intelligence created by a long-dead alien race—have so far not disturbed this. But a once-in-a-lifetime research opportunity to study the Baomind drags Sunya, her wife, and her two teenage kids out to the farthest edges of the galaxy. Sunya is elated, but she soon realizes that she’s in over her head, between the presence of her longtime academic rival, a potential murder plot, and the dying red giant that the Baomind orbits. In the midst of all this conflict, Sunya must make a choice as to what matters most to her—and all of the people around her.

TW/CW: kidnapping, child endangerment, gun violence, murder

Whoever was in charge of writing a succinct blurb for the back of this book needs a raise. Seriously. There is so much going on in The Folded Sky, and the blurb is just the tip of the iceberg. There’s the giant alien AI, of course. But that’s not even the biggest plot point. You’ve got pirates. Incredibly heated historian beef. A murder mystery on a janky space station. Red giants with horrifying implications. Did I mention pirates?

Elizabeth Bear’s characters are the reason that the White Space series as a whole works so well. Book by book, she’s not only created an increasingly multilayered and complex world, but shown it to us through the eyes of people (and systers) who are refreshingly flawed and lovable. I was already sold on the concept of a sleep-deprived, slightly-too-committed historian and her long-suffering but patient alien wife as the protagonists already, but Bear developed them so far beyond that concept; Sunya was one of the series’s most well-realized characters. She’s somebody who tries so hard to be civil and unbiased, but is not-so-secretly very impulsive and prone to being hotheaded—it’s a funny combination, but more importantly, it felt so real. Anybody with a strong sense of justice who’s also incredibly emotional can relate—all of her righteous seething about Vickee was so relatable. Her family dynamic was so heartwarming; Bear could’ve easily gone down the “teenagers are so annoying, hahaha look at them being stupid” route, but I loved how Salvie points out that Luna’s outbursts are just versions of Sunya herself (much to her dismay). Salvie and Sunya were such a lovely couple, and their devotion to their children—and justice as a whole—was the novel’s beating heart. Aside from Salvie being an alien, they felt like a family you could meet any old day, and that’s what sets the White Space series apart as a whole—nobody makes aliens (and people) as real as Bear.

Just when you think the worldbuilding of the White Space series can’t possibly get better…IT’S ELIZABETH BEAR WITH THE STEEL CHAIR!! INCOMPREHENSIBLE MOON-SIZED AI, COMIN’ RIGHT ATCHA! I love her no-holds-barred approach to making the Synarche unabashedly weird, and she followed through on that mission in The Folded Sky. This novel takes us to the more backwater, less technologically-advanced parts of the universe, and the experience of seeing what’s considered backwater in the first place is. All of the new Systers that get introduced were delightful. (Dr. Nonsense was a favorite of mine…you know I love a cephalopod, but Bear did an excellent job of making it more than just a cephalopod in space!) The Baomind itself was so meticulously thought-out, and even after Machine, Bear really pushes the limits on how strange robots and AI can get; I loved the song communication, and the twists that Sunya discovers in her studies are too fascinating to spoil. Either way, it’s proof that Bear is a worldbuilder in her prime, and this series is all th better for it.

The main reason that The Folded Sky didn’t get the full 5 stars from me was the pacing; for a series whose books that I’ve routinely gobbled up hundreds of pages of in one sitting, The Folded Sky had a slower start. But once that hurdle was jumped over, this novel was excellently executed from start to finish. I mentioned the dozens of disparate plot elements earlier, and juggling all of them would be a Herculean task for any author (much less whoever had to condense all that into a blurb). What struck me about The Folded Sky is that out of all of those facets of the plot, none of them were treated as afterthoughts. They were all a critical part of the tangled web of the novel. The murder mystery was just as compelling as Sunya’s historical work, as was the rivalry she had with Vickee and the pirates and everything else. Bear made it look easy, connecting threads that I couldn’t imagine connecting. Of course, it wasn’t perfect—in addition to the beginning, the climax was more drawn out than felt reasonable—but for a plot this jam-packed with different elements, Bear pulled it off surprisingly well.

But I feel like the chaos that the characters are mired in was so crucial to the central themes of The Folded Sky. For one thing, there was the whole Folded Sky concept in a series, and its connections to integrative complexity (new concept that I learned! And they say that only nonfiction is educational…thanks, Elizabeth Bear!) and being able to see issues and their consequences from multiple perspectives, and not, as Dr. Nonsense said, a human binary of only two sides. That was already a very powerful theme, but the chaos also related back to Sunya and her family. Though I don’t have any firsthand experience with parenthood, I loved how this theme was written; you bring children into the world, and you want to protect them from a world that is often cruel and unpredictable, and while you can’t protect them from everything, you desperately want to try. And either way, Sunya and her family are able to keep somewhat levelheaded because of the love they have for each other, and the love that they foster in their community. Overall, The Folded Sky is an ode to the power of multiplicity and many perspectives, whether that’s community-building, family, or studying history.

All in all, a poignant and deeply moving addition to one of the best space opera series out there today. 4.5 stars!

The Folded Sky is the third book in the White Space series, preceded by Ancestral Night (1) and Machine (2). Elizabeth Bear is also the author of several other series, including the New Amsterdam series (New Amsterdam, Seven for a Secret, The White City, Ad Eternum, and Garrett Investigates), the Jacob’s Ladder trilogy (Dust, Sanction, and Grail) and many others.

Today’s song:

That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Posted in Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (7/14/26) – Machine (White Space, #2)

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

Thankfully, after last week’s disappointment, we’ve got something to save the track record for Disability Pride Month. I started Elizabeth Bear’s White Space trilogy earlier this year, and I knew I wanted a physical copy of book 2. It’s one of the great joys in life when a sequel is better than the first book—and Ancestral Night was already a 4.5-star read for me, so this was huge! Machine was a fantastic step up for a series that’s already a cut above the rest.

Enjoy this week’s review!

Machine (White Space, #2) – Elizabeth Bear

Dr. Brookllyn Jens is a special kind of doctor. Her patients are usually aliens, and her status as an emergency specialist means that her job description tends to involve having to jump out of spaceships. It’s already a job that keeps her on the edge. But when Dr. Jens and her crew discover two ships that have been abandoned for thousands of years, they uncover a mystery with layers upon layers of disastrous implications. With a strange, antiquated AI, an entire human crew in cryosleep, and a potential conspiracy on their hands, Dr. Jens and her crew must race against the clock to make sure that everybody makes it out alive.

TW/CW: ableism, misogyny, medical content, xenophobia, violence, murder

Genuinely, my sole problem with this novel is the title. Elizabeth Bear thought out this intricate and complex space opera world full of thousands of aliens and unique space travel, and couldn’t think of a more memorable title than Machine? I mean, yeah. There sure are Machines. Lots of ’em. But come on, really.

As much as I enjoyed Haimey’s story in Ancestral Night, I really think that making the White Space series several collected companion novels was the right move. It expands the intricate world that Elizabeth Bear has crafted in so many exciting ways that were only possible through the eyes of a different cast of characters. I loved the ways that the Synarche and all of the different species within it were fleshed out. Bear’s writing is as sharp as ever—her voice is so witty and hilarious, but she also knows just how to stick the landing when it comes to the more climactic or serious moments. The pacing was top-notch, especially considering that Machine is nearly 500 pages long—I blew through hundreds of pages at a time, and Bear never lost me.

I absolutely adored Dr. Jens as a protagonist, and Bear’s willingness to let her protagonists be messy yet lovable people made her shine. Dr. Jens has such a dry sense of humor, and her wry observations about the world around her made Machine such an entertaining read. But beyond that, I loved her continuous self-reflection—about the ideas she’s constructed about herself, but also about her work and the world around her. The supporting cast was so vibrant and lovable—it was a treat to see Cheerilaq again, first off, but all of the characters were so delightful and added a real human (and syster) authenticity to Core General’s staff. Sometimes your coworker gets on your nerves for no discernible reason, and they’re also a massive cetacean-like being getting wheeled around in a massive tank. On that subject, I loved all of the new Systers that Bear introduces. My creature design brain predictably became that meme of the dog with the propeller beanie and the giant lollipop seeing all of the truly alien aliens that populated the Synarche. But Bear went beyond good creature design and into crafting memorable, multilayered characters, which is what makes her space opera stand out in the end.

In particular, the expansion of the AI and robots in the Synarche was one of the most intriguing aspects of the world that Bear discusses in Machine. The whole plotline with Helen Alloy was one of the most well-executed. I love how Bear interrogates the objectification of women and how sci-fi has historically translated this into female-presenting robots. The visceral discomfort that Dr. Jens has that Helen was specifically created to have a hypersexualized, feminine form felt was like seeing the sun peer through the clouds after decades of weird men writing all kinds of messed-up sex-bots. It’s treated with the appropriate level of disgust—both on Helen and Dr. Jens’s part. Helen’s manipulation also ends up being vital to the later twist, and her entire arc of deconstructing the lies that she was programmed with was handled with such tenderness. Beyond the robots, I think that thread of treating people who have been brought up with hateful ideologies and not immediately dismissing those with different opinions was one of the best aspects of Machine; Bear’s insistence that people—human, alien, or AI—are not inherently bad, only victims of harmful ideas, was so necessary.

Bear’s take on disability in a sci-fi context was also such a respectful and well-researched one! She listed off several sensitivity readers in the acknowledgements, and their work paid off—for someone who seems to be non-disabled, by all accounts, this might be one of the most caring representations of a disabled person and their struggles in sci-fi I’ve seen by a non-disabled author. Dr. Jens has a chronic pain disorder, and she has a special exo-suit that manages some of her pain, but not all of it—sci-fi tech still has limitations in the far, far future. She still aches and gets physically taxed from her daring missions. Granted, I’m not chronically ill, but it felt like Bear paid so much attention to how Dr. Jens’s symptoms would present and how her high-stakes profession would affect it. Additionally, there’s a lot of talk about how disability is handled in the future; there was lots of discussion of “rightminding,” a process that, among other things, mitigates the effects of some mental illnesses. It would’ve been so easy to just slap it on as a cure-all technology, but Bear’s approach was one that I rarely see in sci-fi. It’s not necessarily “disability isn’t cured,” but it’s handled on a case-by-case basis, there’s an understanding that different kinds of disabled people have different needs and opinions about how they want to live with their disabilities with the technology available. This rejection of the one-size-fits-all approach to disability was a breath of fresh air, and wasn’t afraid to get into the nuance of how disabled people live their lives.

Disability wasn’t the only issue that gets dealt with in a refreshing amount of nuance. Bear was not afraid to get into the weeds with this novel, and it made my reading experience so much better. Machine, more so than its predecessor, gets into how a utopia and utopian ideas can be twisted into something sinister. It all feels very Ursula K. LeGuin—the Synarche is without a doubt an ambiguous utopia like The Dispossessed. (First off, I liked that Bear interrogates the ethics of “rightminding” targeting potentially “dangerous ideologies,” and how that ends up being decidedly non-utopian.) I appreciated that Bear discusses how well-intentioned utopias can be co-opted into vehicles for hatred, but also how that revelation wracks the people who genuinely believed in this utopia—people like Dr. Jens. Her arc in having faith in her hospital and the Synarche was so human—her entire reality and faith in the organization she devoted her life to is messily upended. But the realization that she comes to—that you can take the good work you wanted to do and the faith in your fellow people outside of corrupt organizations and do your own work—was one that feels so vital. I also loved the thematic potential of the infectious meme—not unlike the spread of a hateful ideology—that is treated as an infection that has to be weaned out with attention and care. Bear’s depictions of that crushing realization and how Dr. Jens and her coworkers pick up the pieces was so heartfelt, and a very potent message in this day and age.

All in all, a spectacular companion to Ancestral Night that expanded Elizabeth Bear’s masterfully crafted space opera universe with pulse-pounding action and heart. 5 stars!

Machine is the second book in the White Space trilogy, a series of companion novels set in the same universe; it is also includes Ancestral Night (book 1) and Folded Sky (book 3). Elizabeth Bear is also the author of several other series, including the New Amsterdam series (New Amsterdam, Seven for a Secret, The White City, Ad Eternum, and Garrett Investigates), the Jacob’s Ladder trilogy (Dust, Sanction, and Grail) and many others

Today’s song:

still going through my mom’s records from the ’80s. this remains peak.

That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Posted in Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (1/20/26) – Ancestral Night

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

I’d like to think that I’m a competent, capable adult, but a few months back, I picked up book three of this series without realizing that it was book three. Oops. All the same, I was motivated to read it, so I ended up getting a copy with some gift card money for Bookshop.org. Long haul as it was, I’m so glad I took the leap—Ancestral Night knocked me off my feet from the first few pages, and that momentum almost never stopped.

Enjoy this week’s review!

Ancestral Night (White Space, #1) – Elizabeth Bear

Haimey Dz and her small crew fly under the radar, making a living salvaging spaceships at the edge of the galaxy. But after a run-in with a gang of pirates and the discovery of a galaxy-changing revelation hidden inside a derelict spaceship, Haimey knows that she can’t let just anyone get ahold of this secret. Inside of the spaceship is illegal, ancient technology that could turn the tides for the worse if in the wrong hands—and judging from the spaceship, it was already in the wrong hands. Infected with a strange, ancient parasite and with pirates and the government hot on her heels, Haimey and her crew must get to the bottom of this mystery before this tech falls into the wrong hands.

TW/CW: descriptions of injury, violence, blood, emotional abuse, grief, suicide, mental health themes

I really need to put together some kind of list of sci-fi with cats on spaceships. There’s enough out there that it’s a Thing, and though it’s not enough to be a full-on trope, it never fails to make me smile, both as a sci-fi fan and a cat lover. Jonesy from Alien set the precedent, but I think it’s just that through line of historically having cats on boats for good luck that makes it so wonderful. Bushyasta and Mephistopheles deserve a spot in the sci-fi cats pantheon.

The world of Ancestral Night is truly something to behold. From the get-go, I got lost in it so easily—Bear’s prose kept me hooked for all 500+ pages. Part of that was just how intriguing the world was. Everything you could want in a space opera is here—mysterious, derelict spaceships with dark secrets, all manner of very alien aliens, two naughty cats on a spaceship, and perhaps best of all, eldritch, centuries-old seahorse creatures that live in the vacuum of space. Who could ask for more, really? There’s a dormant part of my high school brain that was obsessed with Aurora Rising that got beyond amped about salvaging spaceships, so that was an automatic win. I loved the Atavikha an unreasonable amount, as well as the aliens, but that’s not news at all. But I love the care that Bear took to make this world feel familiar in the right places, but appropriately alien where it was necessary. It’s a world where you can read George Eliot in your free time, but also come face to face with a creature so alien you barely have any appropriate human analogues for it. Balance is key, and Bear balanced it well.

With sci-fi like this, there’s a tendency to forget that no matter how much time you spend on worldbuilding, your universe still may feel like it isn’t lived in; everything’s too sterile and sleek, and you never get the sense that these strange planets and moons and whatnot are places where people spend their lives. Bear circumvented that issue from the get-go—everything about Ancestral Night felt lived-in, from the humble spaceships to the crowded space stations that Haimey and her friends navigated. Her spaceship wasn’t just a way to get around: it was a place where Haimey lounged around and read old books and petted her cats. Every corner that the crew explored was full of not just lore, but memories—everything in Ancestral Night had a story, and that did almost as much work as the worldbuilding in making sure that Bear’s world felt real.

Another aspect that made Ancestral Night feel real was Haimey herself. I’m all for representing marginalized people beyond stereotypes, but there’s something to be said for queer characters who are unapologetically messy and make decidedly terrible decisions—and Haimey makes terrible decisions aplenty. (I finished Pluribus not long ago, and I thought the same about Carol. I guess they’re both lesbians who fall for highly questionable pirate ladies, in the end.) If Ancestral Night was a TV show, I fully would’ve thrown something at the TV when she kissed Zanya. HAVE YOU LEARNED NOTHING? That being said, she felt so staggeringly real in the amalgamation of all her hopes and flaws. Even in this far-flung sci-fi world, this woman who reads ancient classics onboard her spaceship and dotes after her cats and falls for the messiest, scariest pirate women was so refreshingly real, and in spite of those flaws, ultimately lovable.

Ancestral Night is a space opera without question, but the worldbuilding will certainly appeal to the more hard science fiction-leaning readers for sure. Care for the worldbuilding obviously isn’t exclusive to hard sci-fi, especially as a cozy sci-fi/space opera/soft sci-fi defender and enjoyer, but not every space opera you come across goes into this much detail about accretion disks. Bear doesn’t shy away from getting esoteric with the worldbuilding, whether it’s in terms of astrophysics or politics. The politics form the core of the novel for me. My one major problem with the novel was that it had a tendency to go into Haimey’s philosophical musings about the nature of governments and freedom to a point where it was difficult to suspend my disbelief that nothing bad had happened to her while this was all going on, given everything else that happens throughout. (How did she not get conked on the head by pirates mid-digression during half of those scenes?) However, the nature of these digressions fed into the thematic elements of Ancestral Night really well, and I loved how they formed the backbone of Haimey’s character.

Even though not all of the philosophical musing landed, the setup of it, as well as the worldbuilding of Ancestral Night, set such a wonderful stage for Haimey’s character development. She’s caught between two very opposite poles: the Clade where she grew up, where her existence was placid but assimilated, and the pirates, whose messy anarchy is hyperindividualistic to a fault. Set against the backdrop of a flawed yet somewhat well-intentioned government, Haimey’s realization that her true self comes not from sacrificing her individuality or her obligation to do good for others in her community was so poignant. All her life, the notion of who she really is has been forced upon her from both sides, and yet what’s in her heart is where the two ideologies meet: retaining her uniqueness, but not kicking everybody else aside in the process. Haimey’s true spirit comes from how she decides her life should be, but also from the positive relationships around her. It was such a heartfelt message, and Haimey’s arc gave Ancestral Night a powerful emotional core.

All in all, a captivating space opera with real, lovable protagonists, a lived-in universe, and mystery that had me on the edge of my seat. 4.5 stars!

Ancestral Night is the first novel in the White Space series, followed by Machine and The Folded Sky. Bear is also the author of several other award-winning novels, including the New Amsterdam series (New Amsterdam, Seven for a Secret, The White City, Ad Eternum, and Garrett Investigates), the Jacob’s Ladder trilogy (Dust, Sanction, and Grail) and many others.

Today’s song:

That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!