Book Review: The Folded Sky by Elizabeth Bear

Elizabeth Bear adds pirates, a chewy social drama, and a big alien puzzle to her White Space space opera universe. 

Sunya is a researcher traveling to the edge of the galaxy. She studies information and the collection and interpretation of information, and a cache of ancient alien information is the biggest known. But her arrival there is not easy. Pirates are blockading the system. The star that the cache is orbiting, as well as the space station for the researchers, is probably going to go supernova any time now. And then there are the attempted murders. And just what are those mysterious things Sunya is seeing in the corner of her vision?

This is the story of The Folded Sky, the third and latest in her White Space space opera, following Ancestral Night and Machine. It takes place roughly in the same time period as Machine, thus some time after Ancestral Night (the actual Ancestral Night ship makes a brief cameo in the novel). If you will recall, these novels revolve around a spacefaring community of aliens, humans among them. Ancestral Night involved salvaging lost ships, and weird alien technology, as well as doing a lot of the heavy lifting in setting up this verse for the reader. Machine was very much Bear’s love letter to the James White’s Sector General novels, focusing on alien medicine an the ethics of healing and medical care.

So what is The Folded Sky, then? Well just like I was rather reductivist in my descriptions of Ancestral Night and Machine, I could be reductivist with The Folded Sky and say that it was a pirate novel (yes there are pirates in Ancestral Night, but this is a pirate novel). The pirates are a big threat in the novel, but of course, as with any Bear novel, a lot more is going on here. Just in terms of plot, we have the Baomind, an artifact/information reserve of the lost civilization of the Koregoi (who built the Ancestral Night by the way). We have attempted murders. Oh, and did I mention that the star that the Baomind is around that is being studied is on the verge of going supernova?

But, of course, a Bear novel is hardly just about the plot these days, if they were ever. Let’s take our POV and primary character, Dr. Sunya Song. She’s an archinformist, a data historian, someone perfect for taking on the task of organizing the vast library of information sitting in the Koregoi datamind. It’s a work trip of months and years away from her wife and children, or so she thinks. Turns out they are coming to stay at the ramshackle orbital station (really just a collection of ships and parts) after all. Unfortunately for Sunya, they also came on the same ship as Dr. Vickee DeVine, who has also come out to the site. To say that Sunya and Vickee have a personal history would be to say that the Battle of Kursk was a tank battle. Vickee is Sunya’s former mentor, former girlfriend, and is always sets herself as the center of any group of people, and quite successfully at that. She is quite literally the last person Sunya wants to work with on this space station.

Thus, in addition to the overall ticking time bomb of the plots (in additional to the stellar problems, the pirates get a pretty effective blockade going, and supplies are running out, and there is no ansible to easily contact civilization for help), we get a lot of chewy social and philosophical drama, debate and discussion. Rightminding comes in for discussion and debate here, as it did in both Ancestral Night and Machine, but here since we have attempted murders, the debate is how someone who was rightminded (whoever it was) make the attempts. We also get debates on interspecies relations and tolerance (the pirates are intolerant of AIs, transhuman technologies, and aliens), first contact protocols, and the challenges of a work life balance with your spouse and your teenaged kids.

And did I mention the cats?

The central image that I keep going back to in this novel, however, a throughline and a symbol of Sunya, of humanity, of the entire interspecies culture she belongs to, is a bonsai. Sunya’s family has had the bonsai for over a hundred years, from planet to space station, to starships, and all the way here to the Baomind. The bonsai is resilient, but needs care. It’s shrunken and under stress, but it has survived a lot. It is not the biggest, or the baddest, but for some, such as Sunya, it is the epitome of beauty. Humanity is a bonsai. The interstellar polity is a bonsai. And most importantly and most directly, Sunya is a bonsai.

This is never so clear, and never so unmistakable, in comparing her to Vickee DeVine. Their clashes and comparisons are throughout the book. Vickee is seemingly everything Sunya wants to be. Successful, the center of attention and power, supremely confident in her abilities. She is the Queen Bee of the high school of the group of scholars and researchers in Town, and she knows it. Their interactions and conflicts are a major portion of the book. Sunya is constantly seeing herself in the shade of Vickee, and part of the journey of the book is Sunya coming to terms with Vickee. There are some extremely messed up dynamics here, even in a society of Rightminding, People are, in the end, going to be people, and those social dynamics and personal dynamics are central to the book and what it does.

And then there are the social dynamics with the AIs (can AIs be assholes? Bear explores that!), the aliens, all in a confined and restricted space (see above, blockade). Bear has a lot of fun of seeing how these people react to each other under pressure. There is a lot of thought about pirates, and why they fight and strive for what they do, social dynamics laid bare at the barrel of a gun in a blockade.

In addition to those social dynamics, Bear is interested in history, sociology, archaeology, anthropology, first contact (which I mentioned before and mention here again, but am being deliberately vague about any further, save to say that Bear treads into, and exceeds, some of the ideas of Stephen Baxter in his Xeelee novels.). There are also echoes and reflections of writers such as L.E. Modesitt's space operas, Kristine Kathryn Rusch (the Diving novels) and Jack McDevitt, just to name a few. 

So, thinking about Baxter for a moment, in addition to the social science fiction there are also relativistic space battles, interesting technology, quirky and unusual physics, codebreaking (of a sort), and much more. Bear has put a variety of scientific disciplines and speculations into the novel, and seemingly no matter what kind of science fiction speculation you are into, you are going to find something to love here.

And then there is Town itself. It’s a fascinating place to set most of the narrative, even without adding that blockade into the mix . It’s more than a bit of a cobble, something that is commented on multiple times. It’s been slapped together because, as Bear notes, high manufacturing of a habitat in a solar system far away from the Core is just not practical. It’s rather skin-of-your-teeth engineering and general feel puts me in the mind of the Finder universe of Suzanne Palmer.

So with all of this going on, you might be asking one important question at this stage, and indeed, it is a concern going into this book? Does it hold together? Yes. Bear manages this by a strict and tight point of view on Dr. Song. There is a creed, for lack of a better word, said at the 4th Street Fantasy Convention (which the author does help run), that “point of view solves everything”. This is the idea that a lot of problems that come up with a narrative can be tackled by how and from whose perspective, or perspectives, you tell your story. Or as the musical Hamilton put it “who lives, who dies, who tells your story?”. But the problem and challenge for the author here is a big book with lots of plots, narratives, big damn ideas, a big damn object, pirates, attempted murders and family drama. And that doesn’t even cover some of the other subplots and the setting and other things to find. How can a reader make sense of this as a narrative? So Bear’s solution is a tight and intimate third person point of view that gives us a deep and penetrating dive into her story, her mindset, her concerns, and her perspective. We get to intimately know Dr. Song, enough that when the murders occur, Vickee is immediately a suspect (and immediately questionable as one) because of how Song feels about her and their shared history and how it comes though that first person perspective and narrative.

As far as the question of whether this book stands alone, I think it does, although you will need to do a tad more work than if you had read Ancestral Night or Machine. There is no overlap of characters (sadly, there is no “Mantis Cop” in this one, although Xhelsea makes a damn good Goodlaw in his stead). This book relies a bit, but only a bit, on you having been in this universe before, but it is not a complete plunge into the unknown. You could start here, if the prospect of this narrative intrigues you the most. Like the previous two books, The Folded Sky is queer, full of interesting characters, and immensely readable.

--

Highlights

• Queer, inclusive space opera, with aliens, AIs and more
• Pressure cooker environment turns up the drama 
• A bonsai tree of a space opera novel.

Reference: Bear, Elizabeth, The Folded Sky [Saga Press, 2025]

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I'm just this guy, you know? @princejvstin

Microreview [book]: Machine by Elizabeth Bear

A potent and timely story about infection, disease, greed, and the power of collective action to deal with large-scale problems

Ancestral Night, in 2019, marked Elizabeth Bear’s return to big wide scale space opera and I was blown away by salvager Halmey Dz’s story of finding a rather strange and amazing prize and discovery that shakes up a lot of preconceptions in her future verse (my review). Memorable characters like the ship AI Singer, and “Mantis Cop” Cheeirilaq completed the novel and made it my favorite novel of the year and I think it is a “definitive and decisive book for SF readers who want to try her work.”

Machine is not a direct sequel to Ancestral Night, although the events of the novel are briefly referenced, and two characters, Cheeirilaq and Singer, do show up in less prominent roles. No, Bear has plenty of stories to tell in this verse and in this novel, Bear decides to tell -- a medical story. Her main character this time is Jens, of the I Race to Seek the Living, an emergency medical rescue vessel of the Synarchy, out of Core General. When the vessel is dispatched from a beacon, they find not only a ship in distress, but also an ancient generation ship, Big Rock Candy Mountain. But the exploration of that ship is not truly in Jens’ purview, and worse, their return afterwards to Core General coincides with strange breakdowns and coincidences. As it becomes clear something is dangerously wrong, it’s up to Jens and her allies to identify it, and fix it before things threaten not only Core General, but the Synarchy itself.

This is the matter of Machine.

Bear calls out in the acknowledgements the inspiration for Core General that was to me delightfully obvious but perhaps newer readers to SF might not be aware of. James White’s Sector General stories and novels describe the adventures of a hospital in space, and Bear’s Core General is clearly a spiritual successor and heir to White’s ideas. Bear of course brings her own sensibilities and ideas to a Hospital in Space but the bones of the homage are there, and the social mores and ideas of White’s novels are updated for modern sensibilities.  This is also done a bit explicitly within the novel itself, as corpsicles found on Big Rock Candy Mountain have some rather archaic, primitive, frankly offensive and un-Synarchy-like ideas about many things. There is a culture clash and some real conflict between Jens and the rest of the Synarchy with Helen, the AI of Big Rock Candy Mountain, and the crew of the ship that they manage to unfreeze and revive.

A feature of Bear’s novels is that many of her protagonists are “Broken, but still good.”. That is something that has been in Bear's novels since the days of Hammered, and if that does not appeal, you are going to have problems engaging with her work. I see so many reviews of Bear's work complain about the falliability and feet of clay of the protagonists. The reviewers do not seem to or do not want to see that Bear's choice is deliberate in using them. Halmey Dz of Ancestral Night extensively used Synarche techniques to improve and stabilize brain chemistry. Dr. Jens, too, is hardly a Heinlenian super protagonist, she has problems, fears, and weaknesses that she has to deal with, her  personality emerging from the first person narrative, and how others regard her and deal with her. As she digs into the central mystery of the book, and as things hit the fan, Jens has a challenge both personal as well as global and running those conflicts in twain is a conveyor belt of personal and station-wide drama that the author leverages effectively and excellently.

But theme is where this novel shines, where the plot shines a light on the themes of the novel and, Bear could not have predicted, themes resonant for a 2020 where we are running rampant with a pandemic. The disease and central problem of the novel is not a viral pandemic (although there are mentions of being worried the corpuscles of the generation ship causing one given how long they have been in space) but an infection of a different but no less dangerous nature. This pandemic allows Bear to explore a variety of themes--the availability of medical care, the responsibility of a community to protect its citizens, the dangers of a stratum of citizens hoarding such care, how a society pays for and supports care for its citizens and, even more subty, the devil’s bargains and tradeoffs that result from such efforts.  There is an overall bigger theme and it is this--that a society owes, should be designed as such, to be directed to the well being of every person  Every person. That, in 2020, is a dangerous and radical notion.  The Synarche is not a utopia, far from it, and less so than Dr. Jens thinks it is as events progress, but it does have a built in social contract that, frankly, the author’s home time and place lacks. 

Be you afraid, though, that this novel is a political treatise and nothing more, Machine fuses the worldbuilding and efforts and world of a multispecies hospital with a ticking bomb plot (once that plot gets fully in motion) that provides all the action and adventure beats you want. Even before the ticking bomb, we get exploration of the generation ship, and the hazards of space...but when things really get moving, the novel presents Jens and the others in a variety of high pressure set pieces and situations that keeps the pages turning. A hospital in space, near a huge Black Hole, and having an infection and a station-threatening problem running rampant, is a recipe for drama, action and adventure, and the author leverages setting, plot and character to make those action beats happen. It is a build to that back half of the novel, but the ramp upward is not boring, and when Jens is under the gun, the novel just flew for me.This novel, like the first, uses elements of the mystery chassis to propel the SFnal one, something Bear is awfully adept and long skilled at deploying.

The only real question is -- do you need to read Ancestral Night before reading Machine? Aside from the couple of crossover characters, there isn’t a lot of connective tissue. Ancestral Night does provide additional grounding in the world of the Synarchy, for readers who not want to be dumped into the deep end. And, frankly, I think Ancestral Night, as good as Machine is, is just slightly the better novel overall (but honestly it would take fractional points in our system to tell the difference). So I say, if you have the time, read them both. If you do not, pick up Ancestral Night and if you do, you know will be in good hands for coming to Core General. I still maintain the first novel is the best one volume introduction to Bear’s work. I think this second novel builds on Ancestral Night, but doesn’t quite manage to surpass it. It may be well that the theme of a pandemic, reading it in a pandemic, gave just the slightest welcome taste of lactic acid taste for the novel for me. 

Still, give me more White Space novels, Bear. My body is ready.

The Math

Baseline Score: 8/10

Bonuses: +1 Strong use of theme really drives the novel.

+1 for the worldbuilding and verve and daring to create a Hospital in Space for the 21st Century.

Penalties: -1 A novel regarding a pandemic may not quite be the novel that you want to read in a pandemic. 

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10 very high quality/standout in its category

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

Reference: Bear, Elizabeth. Machine  [Saga, 2020] 

Microreview [book]: Ancestral Night by Elizabeth Bear

Elizabeth Bear’s Ancestral Night provides Big Smart Objects, interesting aliens, a gigantic canvas, and a strong first person narrative to lay a marker as some of the best Space Opera being written today.

Haimey DZ is a salvager. Along with her business partner Connla, their spaceship’s AI, Singer,and a pair of cats,  they make a living in the far future by finding ancient wrecks, and salvaging information and items of interest. When Haimey and company find an ancient ship, and some even weirder tech that is derived from a rather distressing source, their find is interrupted by interlopers. In a race to find what the piece of technology that attaches to Haimey means and what it can really do, Haimey and crew have a long ranging adventure ahead.

“Mantis Cop” Cheeirilaq is also soon on the case, and if he is ally, Javert, or has an agenda of his own, Haimey doesn’t know. He Is rather determined, though, with a tenacity that Prince Corwin of Amber might admire. Oh and there is a  sexy space pirate is determined to get Haimey and that technology  by any means necessary.

This and a lot more comprises story of Elizabeth Bear’s Ancestral Night. 

Bear’s novels, for me, always really focus on characters. They are frequently broken, and in interesting ways, and the precise way that Haimey is broken seems clear at first in the novel. However, as the plot unfolds, Haimey herself starts to learn and question aspects of her history and even personality. In a world, and even more importantly, a culture and polity that is willing to, and does adjust personality and memory with far greater ease than taking pharmaceuticals may have well indeed adjusted Haimey more than she ever knew. In addition to all the worldbuilding and revelations on larger scales, Ancestral Night really is a journey of discovery and investigation by Haimey into her own past. It’s not a journey that she particularly wants to make, the introspection is painful, but we as readers are brought into that pain and discomfort as Haimey, in the midst of everyone else going on, has to face herself and who she really is.

What’s more, this first person deep dive lets Bear do a lot of exploration of “persons versus society” and explores the aspects of the galactic society that she has built, in relation to the individual, namely Haimey. Her future galactic civilization has advantages over our own, but it is no utopia, and the first person lens and personality dives lets her interrogate the society she has built, and by extension, interrogates our own.

While many readers will come for that deep dive into character, other readers will find the worldbuilding and the vision of a galactic future to be equally if not even more compelling. I was surprised right off that this novel was set in the same verse as the worldship series Jacob’s Ladder. (Dust, Chill, Grail). However, in Ancestral Night, we travel across the galaxy, wind up on multiple stations and ships, and get a much wider canvas. The themes of cultural divergence and the conflicts between cultures are carried from Grail to here, but setting it up as a conflict between the pirates and disaffected of the Freeport communities versus the Synarchy that is the predominant political system in the galaxy.  Plus there are ancient elder race artifacts, a trip to a supermassive black hole, secrets written  into the fabric of the universe, big smart (as opposed to dumb) objects and a lot more for readers to find. And I didn’t even mention the diversity of aliens, and the thought that Bear puts into a multi-species polity. The aforementioned Cheeirilaq is definitely my breakout favorite of these.

Integrating the personal story of Haimey and the larger scale space opera themes, and pieces of the world is the ultimate challenge and writing tightrope that Bear attempts here. It feels like the author is trying to appeal to two separate interest spheres within science fiction--the big damn sense of wonder wide open worldbuilding that stirs the heart, and the deep dive into character, psychology, personality and introspection.

The novel that Ancestral Night brings to mind, then, for me, is Frederik Pohl’s Gateway. That classic novel also gives us a first person protagonist, Robin Broadhead. While the novel gives us spacecraft programmed to go to *somewhere*, a devastated earth, a mysterious elder race (the Heechee) and a huge canvas. (Also, like Ancestral Night, a black hole is an important feature of the worldbuilding). But there is a deep focus in Gateway on the inner emotional life and the psychology of the protagonist, the interior life of Robin IS the point. Exploring Robin’s past and what really happened and how it’s made Robin who he is today--that very much resonates with parts of Bear’s novel. Ancestral Night doesn’t go that far in being a bottle episode, but there is plenty of Haimey coming to grips with her past even as events swirl around her and she has to fight for her future.

In a season, perhaps a year, that has exciting Space Opera on the menu, Elizabeth Bear’s Ancestral Night stands tall as a marker as to why Bear is one of the leading writers in Science Fiction and Fantasy today. For a long time, I’ve recommended her Carnival as a novel for those interested in Bear’s fiction but not quite sure where to start. I think that, between canvas, character, story, and writing, This novel is a definitive and decisive book for SF readers who want to try her work. Given how deeply it is in dialogue with the themes and ideas of SF, on character and worldbuilding, I don’t think that the novel would work for a reader new to SF. This is not a novel to hand to a person just off the streets of mundania and walking through the portal into the realms of science fiction. But for those who already in the White Space of SFF, this is a novel for anyone remotely interested in the Space Opera being written today.

---
The Math

Baseline Assessment: 8/10

Bonuses: +1 for excellent worldbuilding and ancillary characters (team Cheeirilaq!)
+1 for strong first person character and viewpoint that engages in deep questions.

Penalties: -1 this is a novel that is best read by people already well versed in SF and Space Opera to truly appreciate the nuance of the novel


Nerd Coefficient: 9/10 very high quality/standout in its category


Reference:  Bear, Elizabeth, Ancestral Night, Tor, 2019]

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.