All the Windwracked Stars
By Elizabeth Bear
Tor, $24.95, 368 pages
This Norse mythology-based novel is much like the Renshai novels of Mickey Zucker Reichert in its premise. In All the Windwracked Stars, the Valkyrie Muire has abandoned her brothers and sisters to die on the battlefield of Ragnarok. Forced by immortality to live through the age of man, she lives long enough to see a second apocalypse approaching. Guilt over her cowardice at the first ending leads Muire to do what she can to stop the second apocalypse from occurring, putting her in conflict with the Technomancer and Mingan, the Grey Wolf who swallowed the sun and tarnished Valkyrie.
Vampire-like sex, the heaps of introspection and a hard-to-clarify power struggle mar this otherwise creative novel of rebirth and redemption. Characters spend a great deal of time in introspection and evaluating their relationships, making this yarn less of an action story and more of a voyage of self-discovery and melancholy musings in a dying world. This story has the same emotional effect as George R. R. Martin’s Dying of the Light. I recommend the read, even for the action-centric fantasy reader – Bear makes it worthwhile.
Reviewed by John Ottinger III
