Review: All the Windwracked Stars

[megwrites]

Title: All the Windwracked Stars (Edda of Burdens, Book 1)
Author: Elizabeth Bear (matociquala; ElizabethBear.com)
Genre: Fantasy
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Tor


Reviewer's Note: I think it should be stated that while I have tried to review the book alone on it's own merits, I am very certainly reading and thinking through the lens of RaceFail and some of the distasteful things this particular author said. I make no claims to neutrality or even any great amount of objectivity. But I did try to judge the book rather than the author in this review, or at least judge the author on her literary choices rather than her social and public ones. I think it should also be said that I came to this book hesitant to begin with because of the things that were said during RaceFail, and I've be hesitating as to whether to post a review. But reading a book and recording and posting your thoughts about it, positive or negative, is certainly not an endorsement of the author or other things the author does.

Let me be clear. I do not agree with the things this author said during RaceFail, I found them absolutely hurtful and moreover, wrong. I am reviewing this book because it had been sitting on my shelf since last year and I picked it up, read it cover to cover, and now want to post my thoughts about it. I am reviewing it because I find it helpful to me as both a reader and especially a writer to examine what succeeded and what failed in others' works, so I might incorporate that knowledge into my own writing. Whether I've succeeded in being intelligent, useful, objective, or fair in those thoughts is for you to judge.






The Basic Plotline: During the last battle of Ragnarok, Muire fled, leaving her, the valraven Kasimir, and the wolf who ate the sun as the only survivors. For over two thousand years she has survived and now lives in a dying city on a dying world. Protected only by the aging but powerful Technomancer, Eiledon is all that remains, but it is being kept intact at a terrible price. With the end of the world (again) coming, Muire must try to protect Eiledon as her long lost fellow waelcyrge begin reappearing, reborn into strange new forms at the end of the world.


The Positives: I will say this for All the Windwracked Stars. It is not like any other book that I can think of, and it very deeply plunges in to it's source mythology. If you're looking for something that does not remotely resemble anything else on the shelves, you might try this book. It very clearly an example of what should really be called "science fantasy", because it a pretty good blend of science-fiction and fantasy as genres go and picks up a lot of the flavor of both.

If you are a fan of not-so-happy endings, this is also a book that you might enjoy.

I'm afraid, however, that the positives in this novel are few and far between. The writing is, as always, very intelligent and it's obvious that the author did her homework as far as the mythology was concerned. There are also plenty of themes for a reader to sink their teeth into. Slavery and free will and a discourse on both run throughout the book, notably.

I was also surprised to find myself most attached and sympathetic to the two headed valraven as opposed to any human (or near human) character in the book. The less human the characters were, it seemed, the easier it was to like them. Selene, Gunther, and Cristokos were all a lot more interesting than Muire or Cathoair and made a good balance for the human characters.

There are some individual moments that are amusing in the book, and I liked the character of the Technomancer as well, even though she was supposed to be a "corrupt wizard". I would have liked to have explored her side of the story and her strange palace of wonders and hideous things a lot more than I did.


The Negatives: All in all, I did not enjoy this novel very much. There were parts that were good, but overall, it just wasn't a good read for me. And surprisingly, I think that I would have felt this way regardless of RaceFail.

I think most of my irritation with this novel stems from the fact that it is oddly dreamy and non-specific and may be the most vaguely written apocalypse I've ever read. There is a lot of explanation and exposition that is either entirely left out (and the audience must infer what happened) or skimmed over with a handwave of what essentially amounts to the author telling the audience, "well, there were a lot of plagues and famine and stuff. It doesn't matter. Bad stuff happened and now we can get back to the emo Valkyrie!"

While the plotting and characters are adequate, the worldbuilding felt very incomplete. The main question that I was asking throughout the novel, which was, "How did this happen? How did we get from our world to this world?" was not answered to any kind of satisfaction - and I tend to think that misses the point of even writing a science fiction novel. Part of your job as a writer is to explain how we got from point A to point B. Or, if you're writing in an alternate universe, what happened differently so that point A in that world is not point A in this world.

Part of this problem is that I don't know that this novel could, in it's present form, actually explain what happened to everyone else or why an obscure mythology that is not actively practiced by any large number of people is suddenly the center of the world, but there is hardly a trace of such major faiths and mythologies such as Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and so on and so forth.

As with the Promethean Age books, everyone else's mythology is otherwise impotent or non-existent compared to the obscure European mythology being explored with no good reason given for it (and I submit, there is no good, logical reason for it because there's no reason that other religions/mythologies would not survive into the future or be just as potent as European ones)

The first Ragnarok, the one Muire ran from, is never explained or explored and I felt like I'd come in at the end of a movie and moved right on to the sequel, which is a very frustrating feeling.

Leaving the worldbuilding and explanations out really is one of the worst things a novel like this could do, because this novel is so specific in the mythology and situations that it sets up that hurts the reader's suspension of disbelief.

Not to mention that, once again, Bear has done something which really annoys me, and that is to dig so deeply into the esoteric bits of a mythology that it completely excludes anyone who doesn't hold an advanced degree in the subject. Even more so because Norse mythology is very complex, and sometimes contradictory, and almost always confusing. I say this as someone who had to take a couple of seminars on the subject and had read the Prose Edda and Poetic Edda.

So if I, with my very privileged and educated background, had a hard time with this, I can only imagine the readers who's experience of this book was impeded because of what amounted to, from my reading, the writer's need to show off.

For instance, using the word "waelcyrge" where "valkyrie" (a more familiar and more pronounceable concept) would have sufficed really annoyed me. Old English and Norse words are really hard on readers, and there are times when the author can make things a little easier by using more common, or at least more pronounceable words.

Having had college-level experience with this mythology, I can honestly say that it does bear some explanation for the reader. I think this book would have been better served by some basic bit of explanation and exploration of the mythology itself. One notable passage (page 97 in the hardcover edition) mentions galdr, skaldry, seithr, and and volvas (yes, volvas) all in one passage without even pretending to explain to a reader what these words mean, and they're important because the Technomancer intends to build an army of them to protect Eiledon, but there is not even a whiff of explanation given.

I will also say that I was annoyed by how little effort was put into making the magic and science actually compliment each other. You have a Wolf that has swallowed a sun in the same universe that seems to work on the basic principles that ours does, enough so that they can tank farm and engineer viruses scientific. I don't mind that at some point, some scientific principles must be bent or broken to allow the magic to work, but it seemed like the author went, "Well, when you see something like that, a wizard did it!" at the points where it was too hard to really get the science and magic to meet.

The world is based on technomancy and merging prophecy with technology, but it doesn't do this very well at all.

The characters and plot, while adequate, are not really enough to make up for this tremendous lack.

The plot itself is not enough for this book and seems to be wrapped up in a rather deus-ex-machina style. The Wolf jumps into save Muire from the Technomancer at the last moment during a holmgang in which nobody else is supposed to be able to even get into the ring in which they're fighting (something that is not at all explained), and magically Muire finds herself pregnant at the end of the world when everyone else's children are being born dead (for reasons which are not scientifically or magically explained very well) and goes off to start a new world after taking on the burdens of existence.

The death of Astrid felt especially forced, and I didn't see any reason why their fight should end in death. Both Astrid and Cathoair are shown to be experienced fighters who do this for a living and who have fought each other several times and are good at what they do. There's no reason that bout should have ended in Astrid's death.

Other than that it made Cathoair suicidal so he could go try to off himself so Muire could summon the World-snake to heal him and make a bargain with it, because apparently it won't show up when anyone else asks and everything is dying, but when Muire's favorite person drinks strychnine, well, then it makes a grand appearance.

While I liked Kasimir and the Technomancer, probably because they said (read: whined) little and did much, I felt like Muire was the world's oldest emo kid and it amazed me that someone could wallow in guilt and self pity (which felt completely forced and pastede_on_unyay to my mind) for two thousand years.

Cathoair seemed fine to me in the beginning, but Muire's whininess rubbed off on him. And on the Wolf as well. For a bad guy in a Bear novel, the Wolf was surprisingly non-specific himself.

The writing is smart, but uneven and sometimes going between a very formal, almost overwritten narration to something that feels very colloquial and sparse. There are also words that are the New Favorite Ten Dollar Words for this novel, as with all the other Bear books I've read. "Remonstrate" was the heavy favorite. I counted seven uses. "Delimited" was another.

There were also repeats of things that I'd seen done better in Bear's other novels.

Once again, the book contains characters who seem to step out of the situation they're in to have discussions about how Life Is So Hard and There Are No Easy Answers and You Just Have To Keep Going Though It Hurts. I couldn't help thinking, "Didn't we have this same discussion in Ink & Steel? Only, you know, better?"

I also feel annoyed with the constant presence of trauma survivors in Bear's novels. Which is not to say that writing characters which are abuse/torture survivors is wrong or bad, but Bear has a very specific way in which she portrays such people, and as a dramatic device? Torture/abuse survival get tiresome.

As with the Promethean Age books, the heroine ends up allying somewhat with the person she's fighting and they trade magic and the bad guy ends up being something of a good guy. Although I did want to roll my eyes at the Wolf, who seemed at least to be rather badass even as he was a bit whiny, scampering off because he'd been forgiven.

The Wolf I had in my mind (or at least the one I would have prefered) would have skewered Muire with her own sword and had Kasimir for lunch and then happily watched Eiledon fall. Apparently if you ever need to repel a wolf that's swallowed a sun, just forgive it really loudly and it'll go away.

I also saw a repeat of the "thee" versus "you" as a form of intimate address that was presented in The Stratford Man, and I had to say that it annoyed me. In the Stratford Man (which I must say, even after RaceFail, is a far superior work than this one) at least had a neat explanation in the back of the book and some context from which the reader could infer that saying "thee" rather than "you" meant something.

There came a point when I felt like screaming, "Okay, we get it. You're really smart. Can you please just get on with the story already?"

At the end of the day, I think the novel could have been really brilliant. Weaving the very complicated and dour mythology of the Norse into the future could have been really fantastic, but this book isn't the book that succeeded in showing that and more than that, I neither enjoyed nor completely understood this book and I have to say that I do not think my reading was incomplete or shallow. I do not think I gave it any less than my full and diligent attention.

In my opinion, this book failed. It failed as a piece of literature, it failed as science fiction, it failed as fantasy, and it failed as a source of entertainment. In my opinion, this is not a good book.


CoC Score: 3. There are some characters of color in this novel (few, but some), though most characters are white or defaulted to as white in the absence of any other descriptions. Some descriptions of dark skin are vague and could just as easily be talking about a Caucasian person with a tan as a person of color. The premise of the entire world makes me very uncomfortable. Bear never explains or even justifies why there are people of color (the Technomancer is described as having "epicanthic folds" in her eyes, and being half white, half something else) but everyone is basically Norse.

What happened to all the other religions and cultures? Why didn't they survive? And for that matter, why does the Norse version of the end of the world happen when nobody else's version of the end of the world does? There are descriptions of a "multi cultural" stream of refugees who exist for exactly one paragraph and then get wiped out, leaving only the Norse (and mostly) white Eiledon. Which doesn't explain why all the previous planets people have been on were named Norse-style.

Gender Score: 10. Gender is one of those things that Bear doesn't really screw up on. Valkyries and technomancers and strong women abound.

GLBT Score: 5. Cathoair is a prostitute and fighter who services both men and women, and there are descriptions of same-sex relationships back pre-Ragnarok and well as a female human kissing a female cat-human hybrid. There seems to be some vague bisexuality, but no overt, central queerness in the novel.