jethrien

Title: All the Windwracked Stars
Author: Elizabeth Bear
Genre: Mythical SF
Thingummies: 4

Synopsis: The last Valkyrie discovers, as a technologically-devastated world dies, that her thousand-years-dead brethren are being reincarnated.

Thoughts: I loved the experience of reading this book, but find myself puzzled now at its end.

This is a gorgeous piece of writing, with some dazzlingly inventive conceits. Bear drops you right into the second end of the world, on a plain covered by dying angels. We then fast forward to a world devastated a second time, this time after a man-made apocalypse. The writing is lonely and poignant and lovely. The characters--Muire the Valkyrie who abandoned her comrades and so is doomed to watch the world end again and again, Kasimir the two headed winged stallion whose constancy has lasted millennia, the wolf who swallowed the sun, the pit fighter, the Technomancer, the bestiary of the enslaved--are haunting. The references to Norse mythology are ever-present, but oblique.

And it's this obliqueness that's ultimately frustrating. Bear has a way of hinting at things without coming out and saying them, and in the end, I'm not completely sure I understand what happened. What happened to the World Serpent, whether the Technomancer ever understood fully what she was doing, how life will play out for the moreaux, what the ramifications of Muire's choice will ultimately be. I think she left us enough clues to piece it all together, and yet I'm still not sure how.

So I loved reading this. I loved the language, I loved the complexity and shades-of-gray of all the characters, I loved the layered world-building. The ending works on an emotional level--it felt appropriately cathartic. But on a purely logical level, I'm still a little confused. I wish she'd given us a handful more paragraphs to spell things out for those of us who are apparently not quite as swift on the uptake as she wanted her readers to be.