A Free SF Story From Elizabeth Bear

Elizabeth Bear is one of my favourite SF writers. I've not read any novels by her (although I have bought her most recent, Ancestral Night, which is queued up on my Kindle waiting for me to finish Ian McDonald's Luna trilogy). I have read many of her short stories, which keep getting picked for various years' best anthologies.

She has a new story in the latest issue of the online SF magazine, Uncanny. It's called "A Time to Reap", and it's a time travel story set in New England. I can't comment on it as I haven't read it yet, but if it's as good as the other stories I've read by her it will be worth your time. The story is free to read.

The magazine also has an interview with her.

Uncanny Magazine: Both mysteries and time-travel stories have a lot of elements to keep track of—suspects, timelines, where and when characters are at any given point in the story, etc. Did you find it difficult to keep track of all the elements in this story? What were the challenges and benefits of writing a murder mystery that is also a time-travel story?

Elizabeth Bear: Oh yes. This is one of the most technically challenging stories I’ve ever written (curiously, another story published this year, “Erase, Erase, Erase” in last month’s F&SF, is another) and it took me several years to write it. A big part of that was figuring out the end, and how the time travel worked, and what the outcome was for Kat.

Originally, I had thought of writing it with segments of the playscript interposed with the first-person narrative, but after experimenting with that tactic I realized that it was probably overly precious for the intimate story of a friendship between two strong, traumatized girls in mortal peril that I wanted to tell.