Elizabeth Bear's All the Windwracked Stars

[mrissa]

Disclosure: I received this as a review copy from Tor, and matociquala is a friend of mine.

Anybody who has been reading this lj for more than, like, five minutes knows that I am picky about my Norse. Really picky. Annoyingly picky.

With All the Windwracked Stars, matociquala did an end-run around half of the picky, but she did it the hard way. Here is what is easy to get right about a mythology: who has what names. What external attributes, roughly, they have. Here is what is hard to get right about a mythology: what effects it has on the people who live under it. What it means to hold it as a belief system, and sometimes a belief system with substantial life evidence supporting it.

matociquala left out the names and attributes, for the most part. This was not a book that featured lots of gods or references to gods; nobody was running around talking about Braggi's white hair and Thor's goats. She skipped the easy part and went right on to hard, because this is not set on Earth, and it's after Ragnarok, and things go on. But they go on in an extremely Norse way. This book doesn't need to run around making people swear by Freyja's cats, because it's Norse in its bones, and you don't need to put on a display for that. Shouldn't, really.

And, backing up a bit, that is what I can say about this book without getting spoilery: it is about how things go on. How your world ends personally, or your world ends socially, nationally, internationally--the world ends really, as a world--and you still have to find a way to go on. And sometimes none of the options are good and there's no way to get to good from where you are, but there's still a way to get to better, and that's worth doing.

Also matociquala knows where to place a holmgang, structurally speaking, which is satisfying to me in a way that other things are not.

This is my favorite Bear book in awhile, possibly ever. It comes out next week, and if you live in the US or care what happens to our politics here, you will probably have something to celebrate or something to cheer yourself up for next week, right? Maybe some of both, depending on how many important elections are taking place in your precinct. Possibly it is my grim Norse-tinged sense of the world that makes this book seem extremely appropriate for that, but you could at least give it a try and find out.

Comments

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

<3

You read the book I wrote.

Thank you so much.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

(I was also relieved, frankly, because it has almost no overlap with the bits of Aesir noir novel I have except some elements of theme that show up almost automatically if you're dealing with this particular source material. So it will not look like this nifty idea I started messing with before I read your book is a ripoff of your book, which is good, because it isn't, but the reading public doesn't really care when you had ideas, it cares how they're executed, y'know? So yay.)

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

Hee. Yeah. No, I kind of figured that Sam Spade Is A Valkyrie was unlikely to show up, oh, just about anywhere else....

And yeah, you cannot escape, say, periapocalypse and genderfuck when dealing with Norse. It's in the batter...

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

"Grim" as partial praise. Yah.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

Yah. Refusing to fall over even though you know you're dead as the highest human virtue. *g* That sort of stuff.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

It was a very confusing moment when I realized that not everybody had "trooper" as one of their highest nouns of praise.

[freelikebeer.livejournal.com]

It was a very confusing moment when I realized that not everybody had "trooper" as one of their highest nouns of praise.

That made me chuckle.

[txanne.livejournal.com]

Holmgang--homegoing?

I wonder if my local Books-a-Squillion will have it. If not, I have an internets.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

"island fight." More or less. Two men enter...

There's one in The 13th Warrior, if you've seen it.

[txanne.livejournal.com]

Crichton doing the Middle Ages? I think not. o_O

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Crichton doing anything at this point, ditto. Intellectual dishonesty does not make for better fiction, realio trulio.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

Seriously.

But. It does have a holmgang.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Oh, the Crichton book is horrible, but the movie is fun. For certain values of "fun."

[reveritas.livejournal.com]

You cannot escape genderfuck when dealing with Norse

... Finland's new motto?

[snickelish.livejournal.com]

Ooh, I am so excited to read this! It was tops on my list for stuff of new stuff coming out this year that I've been really looking forward to.

[mkille.livejournal.com]

Aaaaand in it goes to MPOW's shopping cart.

[zwol.livejournal.com]

*adds book to list of things to pick up at beloved not-local-anymore fantasy bookshop later this week*

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Glad I read your review before Kirkus. For some reason their review sounds like unrelieved grimness to me. I don't do unrelieved grimness voluntarily; real life provides all too many cases if I wanted that sort of thing. Grim but going on to get to better is a whole 'nother thing. I can do that.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

Norse does a lot of unrelieved grimness. Comes with the weather, perhaps?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Oh, nonsense, it's only unrelieved if you have funny definitions of relief.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

"The Saga of Burnt Njal"?

[cadithial.livejournal.com]

Actually, saw the book in Barnes and Noble on the weekend :)

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Yay! Thanks for the tip. Amazon shows it in stock now...getting. Not on Kindle yet, alas.

[genarti]

This review alone has me putting this on my to-read list.

Norse mythology is not one of my particular points of pedantry; my knowledge of it doesn't go all that much beyond your basic names-and-attributes primer with some Viking society trivia thrown in. But mythology, religion, culture, all of that in general -- the way it influences people bone-deep and soul-deep, and shapes their whole world, and the way different people are shaped differently -- that's what real worldbuilding is to me, because that's what real human worlds are, and so very few authors do it really convincingly. This sounds fabulous.

[cloudscudding.livejournal.com]

Hmm, I never would have imagined that Norsemen fought duels. And I have now learned a new word!