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Musing on books.

Article Excerpt
All the Windwracked Stars, by Elizabeth Bear, Tor, 2008, $24.95.

Zoe's Tale, by John Scalzi, Tor, 2008, $24.95.

The Iron Hunt, by Marjorie M. Liu, Ace, 2008, $7.99.

ELIZABETH Bear's latest novel (or at least the one I'm reviewing, since I think by this time there are three in total) is hard to characterize. Or perhaps hard to pin down. It is not, strictly speaking, fantasy; it is not, strictly speaking, science fiction. It's some blend of both that involves so many tropes from either genre--all of them leaning on the echoes of myth and legend that she's heard and made her own--that it should fall apart under its own weight. But it doesn't. That's the marvel of All the Windwracked Stars.

This book starts with the end of the world. No, really. One could assume, given the starting point, that the book would then delve backward into the past that led to that point. It doesn't. Instead, it gives the three survivors of a bloody battle a moment of bonding in, yes, a smaller bloody battle, and it leaves them changed. That one of the three, Kasimir, is a two-headed winged creature that chooses a rider for life doesn't diminish this; that another, Muire, is waelcyrge, the least of her sisters, but the only one to survive, hints at the Norse myths and legends that have all but ended with this battle.

Muire stays to bury the dead, while the third and last survivor, silent and unseen, settles down to wait for the last of the world to flicker out and die. He is Mingan, and he has seen the death of...

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