Jenny Casey
Cover art by Paul Youll
Hammered
Scardown
Worldwired
These are my first three published novels, and my editor at Spectra was kind enough to see them all put out within a year, which made a nice kind of pile on my bookshelf. These books are a sort of future history, in that they tell one version of the story of fifty-year-old part-Iroquois part-cyborg Canadian Armed Forced Master Warrant Officer Genevieve Casey, and how she saved the world. For, um. Certain values of "she" and "world" and "saved."
The first one--Hammered--has been described as Cyberpunk, but I tend to think of it as somewhat more post-Cyberpunk--which is to say, it's much less about style over substance, about living fast and dying young and leaving a highly augmented corpse, and much more about living with the trauma and aftereffects of being the poor sucker who didn't die young. Scardown expands the sphere of discussion to earthly politics, and Worldwired takes the conversation out to the galaxy. Also, I am pretty proud of the fact that these books have gotten me hate mail from both conservatives and liberals (people get really het up over the idea of the English-speaking former British Colonies, including Canada and Australia banding together as a world economic power. You would think they found it scary or something.)... and a fair amount of "Yeah, good job, kid," letters from soldiers past and present.
I should warn you about the "French." More precisely, there's a little bit of Franglish in these. Unfortunately, I didn't do as good a job on it as I hoped, but.... experiment and learn. It's all pretty easy to get through, anyway: anything that's not a curse word is translated in the text. And as for the rest of it, if you actually speak French, just pretend you're reading badly spelled English. If you don't read French, you should be able to get through it by reading it out loud.
Also, there's an AI in here who is one of my favorite characters ever. Most of the reviews spoiler his identity, and the back cover copy is a bit spoilery too, so I'm going to edit it for inclusion here:
Here's what the publisher had to say about all three books:
Hammered
The waters have risen. The wars have been fought. And the only way forward is through one woman's mind...Once Jenny Casey was somebody's daughter. Once she was somebody's enemy. Now, the former Canadian special forces warrior lives on the hellish streets of Hartford, Connecticut in the year 2062. Racked with pain, hiding from the government she served, running with a crime lord so she can save a life or two, Jenny is a month shy of fifty, and her artificially reconstructed body has started to unravel. But she is far from forgotten. A government scientist needs the perfect subject for a high-stakes artificial intelligence project, and has Jenny in his sights.
Suddenly, Jenny Casey is a pawn in a furious battle, waged in the corridors of the internet, on the streets of battered cities, and in the complex wirings of her half manmade nervous system. And she needs to gain control of the game, before a brave new future spins completely out of control.
Scardown
She's a hero custom-made for a world it may already be too late to save.The year is 2062, and after years on the run, Jenny Casey is back in the Canadian armed forces. Those who were once her enemies are now her allies, and at fifty, she's been handpicked for the most important mission of her life--a mission for which her artificially reconstructed body is perfectly suited. With the earth capable of sustaining life for just another century, Jenny must discover brave new worlds as pilot of the starship HMCSS Montreal. And with time running out, she must succeed where others have failed.
Now Jenny is caught in a desperate battle where old resentments become bitter betrayals, and justice takes the cruelest forms of vengeance. With the help of a brilliant AI, an ex-crime lord, and the man she loves, Jenny may just get her chance to save the world. If it doesn't come to an end first...
Worldwired
As long as there's an earth to defend, Jenny Casey has a job. But she may outlast the world she was custom-built to save...Give Canada's Master Warrant Officer Jenny Casey an inch and she'll take a galaxy. That's just the kind of person a world on the brink of destruction needs. The year is 2063 and the Earth has been brutalized. [spoiler for Scardown redacted] Humanity must find another option...
Perched above the destruction in the starship Montreal, Jenny remains in the thick of the fray. Plugged into the worldwire, connected to a brilliant AI, her mind can be everywhere and anywhere at once. But it's focused on the mysterious alien beings right outside of her ship. Are they here to help or destroy? With the Earth a breeding ground for treason and betrayal as governments struggle to assign blame, Jenny holds the fate of humankind in her artificially reconstructed hand...
I have to admit "the hellish streets of Hartford, Connecticut" is probably the single line in my cover copy that has given me the most joy. The thing is, if you have been to Hartford, it's not that farfetched....
There's some positive press and comment, too:
"Hammered is a very exciting, very polished, very impressive debut novel." — Mike Resnick
"Gritty, insightful, and daring—Elizabeth Bear is a talent to watch."—David Brin, author of the Uplift novels and Kiln People. (This one keeps getting excerpted on book covers as "Elizabeth Bear is a talent to watch," which kind of has the ring of one of those blurbs you give when you don't really want to give a blurb. You know, like: "This is not a book to be tossed lightly aside."
"A gritty and painstakingly well-informed peek inside a future we’d all better hope we don’t get, liberally seasoned with VR delights and enigmatically weird alien artifacts... Bear builds her future nightmare tale with style and conviction and a constant return to the twists of the human heart." — Richard Morgan, author of Altered Carbon
"Hammered has it all. Drug wars, hired guns, corporate skullduggery, and bleeding-edge AI, all rolled into one of the best first novels I’ve seen in I don't know how long. This is the real dope!" — Chris Moriarty, author of Spin State
"A glorious hybrid: hard science, dystopian geopolitics, and wide-eyed sense-of-wonder seamlessly blended into a single book. I hate this woman. She makes the rest of us look like amateurs." — Peter Watts, author of Blindsight
"Packed with a colorful panoply of characters, a memorable and likeable anti-heroine, and plenty of action and intrigue, Hammered is a superbly written novel that combines high tech, military industrial politics, and complex morality. There is much to look forward to in new writer Elizabeth Bear." - Karin Lowachee, Campbell-award nominated author of Warchild
"The language is taut, the characters deep and the scenes positively crackle with energy. Not to mention that this is real science fiction, with rescues from crippled starships and exploration of mysterious alien artifacts and international diplomatic brinksmanship between spacefaring powers China and Canada. Yes, Canada!" - James Patrick Kelly, author of Strange but not a Stranger and Think Like a Dinosaur
Okay, so we know it's gritty....
"Bear is talented." — Entertainment Weekly (Thanks! How did you like the book?)
"Moves at warp speed, with terse ‘n’ tough dialogue laced with irony, larger-than-life characters and the intrigue of a 3-D chess match. It’s a sharp critique of the military-industrial complex and geopolitics—with our normally nice neighbors to the north as the villains, to boot...a compelling, disquieting look at a future none of us ever wants to see." — The Hartford Courant (Nothing beats a little love from the hometown paper.)
"A violent, compulsive read...[Bear is] a welcome addition—not only to ‘noir sci-fi’ but to sensational fiction in general...Bear’s greatest talent in Hammered is writing about violence in a way that George Pelecanos, Robert Crais and the aforementioned Parker would envy...Bear isn’t just a writer to watch, she’s a writer to applaud." — The Huntsville Times
"Bear’s twenty-first century has some intriguing features drawn from ongoing events... desperate and violent urban centers, artificial intelligences emerging in the net, virtual reconstructions of famous personalities, neural augmentation, nanotech surgical bots. Bear devotes admirable attention to the physical and mental challenges that radical augmentation would likely entail, and Hammered certainly establishes Bear as a writer with intriguing potential." — F&SF
"An SF thriller full of skullduggery, featuring a razor-sharp ex-soldier who’s on the run from her own government for fear they’ll want to do worse things to her than they already have, and they’ve done a lot…A tense, involving and character-driven read…A doozy of a ride." — New York Review of Science Fiction
"An enthralling roller-coaster ride through a dark and possible near future." — Starlog
"Bear deftly creates believable characters who walk into your heart and mind easily... [her] prose is easy on the mind's ears, her dialogue generally crisp and lifelike." — Scifi.com
"For all the widescreen fireworks and exotic tech, it is also a tale in which friendships and familial relationships drive as much of the action as enmity, paranoia and Machiavellian scheming...Here there be nifty Ideas about natural and artificial intelligences; satisfyingly convoluted conspiracies; interestingly loose-limbed and unconventional interpersonal relationships; and some pretty good jokes...I will simply warn the tenderhearted that Bad Things great and small will indeed be allowed to happen, but that those who come through the other side will have exhibited that combination of toughness and humanity that makes Bear one of the most welcome writers to come over the horizon lately." — Locus (I love that quote.)
"By sheer force of will and great writing, Bear has pulled off a rather remarkable feat without drawing attention to that feat. That is, beyond the attention you get when you nab a John W. Campbell Award...What we didn’t expect was that she’d manage to sort of re-invent the novel and re-invigorate the science fiction series...[a] rip-roaring tale of detection, adventure, aliens, conspiracy and much more told in carefully-turned prose with well-developed characters." — The Agony Column
"A compelling story... Bear has plotted the global geopolitics of the next sixty years with considerable depth and aplomb." - Strange Horizons
And Publishers Weekly weighs in with mixed emotions:
Hammered: Drugs, gangs and Internet warfare run rampant in Bear's ambitious debut novel, an SF thriller set in 2062. Jenny Casey, a former Canadian special forces warrior who's half-machine as the result of an accident years earlier, is living in Hartford, Conn., when a scientist working in need of the perfect subject for a high-stakes virtual-reality project puts Casey in his sights. Casey becomes a pawn in a furious battle waged in the corridors of the Internet, on the streets of battered cities and in the complex wirings of her half-manmade nervous system. As she approaches her 50th birthday, Casey manages to maintain a good sense of humor, a trait unfortunately lacking in the rest of the cast, which includes an old flame, a gangster named Razorface and a female ex-con who befriends the heroine. Bear's often jagged prose ("We disembark in Brazil, which has the distinction of being one of several countries I've been shot at in. Shot down over, even") suits the frequent, at times confusing narrative jumps between the virtual and real worlds. Though readers may have difficulties following this sometimes chaotic story, advance praise from such SF pros as Mike Resnick, Richard Morgan and Peter Watts should ensure a strong start. (Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)