All the Windwracked Stars
Written by Elizabeth Bear
Narrated by Kate Reading and Michael Kramer
3.5/5
()
About this audiobook
It all began with Ragnarok, with the Children of the Light and the Tarnished ones battling to the death in the ice and the dark. At the end of the long battle, one Valkyrie survived, wounded, and one valraven-the steeds of the valkyrie.
Because they lived, Valdyrgard was not wholly destroyed. Because the valraven was transformed in the last miracle offered to a Child of the Light, Valdyrgard was changed to a world where magic and technology worked hand in hand.
2500 years later, Muire is in the last city on the dying planet, where the Technomancer rules what's left of humanity. She's caught sight of someone she has not seen since the Last Battle: Mingan the Wolf is hunting in her city.
Elizabeth Bear
Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. She is the Hugo, Theodore Sturgeon Memorial, Locus, and Astounding Award–winning author of dozens of novels and over a hundred short stories. She has spoken on futurism at Google, MIT, DARPA’s 100 Year Starship Project, and the White House, among others. Find her at www.elizabethbear.com.
More audiobooks from Elizabeth Bear
Carnival Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Undertow Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Machine Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ancestral Night Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related to All the Windwracked Stars
Titles in the series (3)
All the Windwracked Stars Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5By the Mountain Bound Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Sea Thy Mistress Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related audiobooks
Range of Ghosts Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Steles of the Sky Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Ingenious Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Redemption's Blade: After the War Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Sea Thy Mistress Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5By the Mountain Bound Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Wrong Stars Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Chill Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Summerland Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Shattered Pillars Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Unfinished Land Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Faded Sun Trilogy Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Paladin Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Causal Angel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Empire in Black and Gold Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Dragons of Babel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Roadmarks Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Iron Dragon's Mother Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Last First Snow Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Latchkey Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDreadnought: A Novel of the Clockwork Century Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Thunderbird Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Dust Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Red-Stained Wings Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Midworld Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Glasshouse Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Cold Steel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Zero World Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5On The Steel Breeze Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Misspent Youth Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5
Fantasy For You
A Court of Mist and Fury Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Parable of the Sower Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Court of Wings and Ruin Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Iron Flame Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5From Blood and Ash Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Court of Thorns and Roses Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Fourth Wing Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Alchemist Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Fairy Tale Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Good Omens Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Court of Silver Flames Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5American Gods: The Tenth Anniversary Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Court of Frost and Starlight Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Starling House: A Reese's Book Club Pick Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The House in the Cerulean Sea Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Hobbit Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Name of the Wind Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Two Towers Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Legends & Lattes: A Novel of High Fantasy and Low Stakes Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Good Omens: A Full Cast Production Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Stardust Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Neverwhere Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bookshops & Bonedust Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This Is How You Lose The Time War Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Kingdom of Flesh and Fire Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Return of the King Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of The Oxford Translators' Revolution Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Outlander Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Anansi Boys Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related categories
Reviews for All the Windwracked Stars
121 ratings14 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Elizabeth Bear loves horses. So in this story there is a talking flying super horse. I’m not surprised.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I loved the premise of this book, but a list of characters would have greatly improved my reading experience. (Please correct me if this feature is, in fact, included; I am reviewing after long-having returned the book to the library.)
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5It took me a while to get into this book. The imagery is beautiful and the characters are intriguing, but there's so many seemingly disconnected characters, so many names I'm not sure whether I'm supposed to recognize. It's not until late in the book that everything starts coming together into one story -- and then it's great! But it's still not going to be one of my favorite books. I've read other books by this author that I've liked much more.
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5An interesting start though the Valkyrie concept had me confused: many names and words to learn about before you leap in to this world. Possibly for another time. (Yes, but Kindle.)
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I'm a great fan of Elizabeth Bear's writing style and imagination, so I dived eagerly into this. Apparently it's one of her earlier works, heavily revised for publication, and the first book in The 'Edda of Burdens' series. It's a curious blend of post-apocalyptic science fiction and Norse mythology with bits of high fantasy, steampunk and animal anthropomorphism thrown in, and it all works together suprisingly well. It's also great to read about a well-imagined world that borrows heavily from Norse rather than over-used Celtic mythology.
It begins with Ragnarök. The world survives the Last Day, as do the waelcyrge Muire, the valraven Kasimir, and the betrayer, Mingan the Grey Wolf. Fast forward a few thousand years and the world is once again facing another (this time self-inflicted) apocalypse. Guilt over her cowardice at Ragnarök makes Muire try to redeem herself and prevent the second apocalypse, and in doing so she encounters her old enemy the Grey Wolf, who wants to finish the dying world so a new can be born, and some other key figures from the past. That's a very simplistic description of the storyline and doesn't really do it justice. It's a complex and audacious novel with a lot of ideas and elements in it. It says much for her craftmanship that Bear succeeds in keeping her flood of ideas under control and pulling them all together for a satisying conclusion.
The characters are flawed but for the most part fascinating. I didn't care much for Cathoair the prize-fighting prostitute and never really engaged with Mingan, but Muire herself, with her burdens of guilt and sorrow is a very believable and sympathetic character. I found myself actually caring a great deal about her. I also really liked the cat-woman Selene, who is a admirably fresh and unique take on the typical animal/human hybrid theme.
It's not a happy book. It's difficult and very bleak in places. But I found if I gave it time and my full attention it's an extremely rewarding read. Bear is a highly imaginative and creative writer and her language is beautiful and lyric. She's not afraid to experiment or make her readers think and work things out for themselves. I'm already looking out for the other two books in the series. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This took me a long time to get into. Part of this was due to Bear's writing style which is quite dense and expects you to just 'get on board'*, part of this is that my scanty knowledge of norse mythology made it hard to keep up with what might have been obvious to better read readers, but mostly I think it's that Bear keeps us in the dark about who these characters are and why they're doing what they're doing.
A little more of the back stories early on might have made it easier for me to get involved and care about everyone's damage.
Howeveraround the half way point everything fell into place and was completely wonderful and heartbreaking from that point on building to an beautiful ending. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The premise: ganked from BN.com: It all began with Ragnarok, with the Children of the Light and the Tarnished ones battling to the death in the ice and the dark. At the end of the long battle, one Valkyrie survived, wounded, and one valraven – the steeds of the valkyrie.Because they lived, Valdyrgard was not wholly destroyed. Because the valraven was transformed in the last miracle offered to a Child of the Light, Valdyrgard was changed to a world where magic and technology worked hand in hand.2500 years later, Muire is in the last city on the dying planet, where the Technomancer rules what’s left of humanity. She's caught sight of someone she has not seen since the Last Battle: Mingan the Wolf is hunting in her city.My Rating: 7 - Good ReadI will warn that All the Windwracked Stars is like Elizabeth Bear's other work in that she throws you in the middle of the story and expects you to swim while reading. Sometimes, this is difficult, and while I'm no expert in the Norse mythology Bear is clearly using, I didn't have the same kind of trouble that I normally do with this technique. Indeed, this book read surprisingly quick, and I think it's because the cast of characters was so fascinating, each with their own problems, their own burdens. It's just a fascinating tale, and while I wasn't always sure what was happening by the end of the book, I felt I understood and I was engaged in the outcome, even if I wasn't sure what I wanted the outcome to be. But it opens and closes wonderfully, and I'm quite tempted to get the next two books in the trilogy, one of which is a prequel to this one.Spoilers, yay or nay?: Yay, but this isn't the kind of story where knowing the details ruins the story. The full review is at my blog, and if you're interested, you can follow the link below. As always, comments and discussion are most welcome.REVIEW: Elizabeth Bear's ALL THE WINDWRACKED STARSHappy Reading!
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I've liked most of what I have read from Elizabeth Bear, and I liked the first chapter of this book (which I believe I had read before as a stand alone short story) quite a bit, but I had a hard time maintaining interest in the main storyline. Bear gives us an end of the world setting and a basic premise which both seem to offer quite a bit of potential but then proceeds to tell a story which is little more than profoundly self-centered characters maiming and having carnal knowledge of each other while this world completes its long standing program of falling apart around them. Maybe Valkyries are supposed to act that way? I often enjoy books where what is initially a very confusing and convoluted back story gradually begins to take shape and make sense. In All the Windwracked Stars I ended the book just as confused about the world as I was at the end of the first chapter. Perhaps I would have enjoyed it more if I had come to the book with a better understanding of Norse mythology.So, a few inspired images, but a book where I really couldn't connect with any of the characters.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5You never know what to expect when reading a book by Elizabeth Bear, and All the Windwracked Stars is no exception. This is a post-apocalyptic novel centered around figures of Norse mythology who are trying their best to stave off the next round of apocalyptic disasters. The main character is an immortal who has managed to keep her naiveté mainly because she believes in black and white and doesn’t understand everything that has been happening around her.Muire wants to help, but she doesn’t have much left. Her god has abandoned her, her comrades all died thousands of years ago in a pointless battle, and she carries the guilt of her survival as a weight on her shoulders. Or at least all that is what she believes to be true.This story brings us to the brink of understanding and then rips everything away in favor of a new understanding that Muire, and therefore us, could not have believed possible. More than changing the shades of black and white, this novel focuses on the influence of life, of people, of circumstance on what the characters can become. It offers changes of redemption and reveals horrifying truths.Here is where Bear’s talents as a storyteller shine: Despite several twists in which everything known is unknown, everything set is turned on its head, she never once lost me. I could see the trail, or if I couldn’t, the new information came in such a way that it made sense. Hand in hand I learned what Muire did, and suffered the truth with her. This is no simple tale. It has layer upon layer that absorbs you and makes you want more even though the book begins at the end of the world. Luckily, there are additional novels in this series, as strange as that may seem, because this is too interesting a world to visit in a single novel.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The immortals are killed in battle and mortals take over the world. The world is dying again. It is up to the last remaining immortals to save the world.It is beautifully written and told a great story of an interesting world. However it took me a while to get into the book, and some of the sections felt a bit long winded.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Picked this up from my local library on a whim when I was collecting books for random reads. I'd passed over it a few times in the SciFi section, and decided to give it a shot. Bear weaves a very detailed world, a very creative blend of magic, mechanics, physics, and life, following the path of a lone angel, who ran from the last great battle. Or she thought she was alone, until she comes across a young fighter, who echoes of a brother angle of long ago. As the world dies, someone is using unscupulous methods to try to preserve a part of it for their own self glory, and corrupting others in the process. Muire, the lost angel, slowly unravels this conspiratorial mess finds a path of self-redemption for running thousands of years ago. Through multiple worlds/times with help of Kasmir she sets out to make the world healed, and whole once more.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I just finished [All the Windracked Stars] and I must say, Elizabeth seems to have a bit of a thing for Bad Boys. Lucifer in the Stratford Man books and now Mingan in this one both end up having those redeeming qualities that make them so interesting and perhaps tempting in real life. Her characters reveal themselves bit by bit so that you come to understand them as the story goes on. You have to pay attention and look for clues as to why they act the way they do. I love complicated, eccentric people and maybe that's why her books appeal to me.Ms. Bears books lead me to round out my education that had weighed heavily in Chemistry and Math. The Stratford Man books caused me to find some of Marlowe's plays to pursue, now I find myself needing to read up on Valkyries. Fun!
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Of this book, the author says: “Technically speaking, it's a periapocalyptic-Norse-steampunk-noir-romantic-!New Weird-high/low-fantasy. With SFnal elements.” She’s not exaggerating. Technically, it’s also postapocalyptic— the apocalypse being, in this case, Ragnarök. (That alone was enough to suspend my usual misgivings of postapocalyptic fiction.)Bear depicts a technomagical far future, somewhat reminiscent of that of Walter Jon Williams’ Metropolitan and City on Fire; our heroine Muire is the last of the valkyries, living in secret in the last city of a world that flourished post-Ragnarök and fell. The history of the world is infused with the Norse sagas, with the highest of technomagic being rooted in the runes that Odin learned and the Eddas being part of the education of the youth. The perspective she presents is at such variance with what I recall from my study of mythology that the feeling I get is that the familiar Eddas are the result of source material changing over time, and that this tale is showing some of the secret history behind them. (This never gets spelled out explicitly; the characters are too busy for that kind of academic exposition.)The tale itself is of several kinds of redemption for several different characters, starting with the valkyrie who survived Ragnarök by running away. There are plenty of surprising twists and turns, and the variant Norse mythology didn’t give anything away for me.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5It is Ragnarok—the Last Day of the Last Battle, the end of the world—and Muire, who thinks of herself as the least of the Valkyries, has survived. She fled the battle before it began, and her brothers and sisters fell without her by their sides. As she goes about the task of finding their bodies in the falling snow, she discovers that one other has survived, though badly wounded—a valraven, one of the two-headed and winged steeds ridden by the Valkyries. In the last miracle of the dying Light, the valraven, Kasimir, is healed and transformed into a creature more of metal than of flesh. He chooses Muire as his new rider, but she, convinced of her own cowardice, denies him and flees his offered love and loyalty.Unfortunately for Muire, she discovers that it takes a long time for a world to die. Though our world ended with that battle, the death throes last another two thousand years, and she, a demi-goddess, survives them all, watching as human societies rise and fall. At last, the world is nearing its last gasp. Only one city now remains on the blasted surface of the world, Eiledon, ruled over by the protective Technomancer. Muire lives quietly within Eiledon’s walls, awaiting the final end, but discovers, to her shock, that she and Kasimir were not the only survivors of Ragnarok after all. Mingan the Wolf, the greatest of the Tarnished Ones, has survived as well and now hunts the streets of the last city, stealing souls for sustenance.Ashamed of the cowardice that kept her alive the first time, Muire resolves that this time she will fight Mingan, protecting the last few humans from his evil. But as she slowly discovers that the spirits of her Valkyrie brethren are being reborn into human bodies and that the magic the Technomancer has used to keep Eiledon standing has come at a terrible price, she discovers that there is much more to her own last battle than dying bravely beneath the Wolf’s terrible kiss. Lyrical, multi-layered and complex, with valiantly flawed characters and a finely honed combination of ancient themes and far-future tech, “All the Windwracked Stars” is compelling and rewarding.