All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane AndersTor, 2016

All the Birds in the Sky is the kind of crossover genre book, like, say, Lev Grossman’s Magicians books, that I can really get into. It’s smart and funny, and self-consciously places itself in/plays with genre conventions (quest narratives, saving-the-world stories, stories of outcast geniuses) and other literary conventions (star-crossed lovers, a sort of fairy-tale trope of terrible parents) in a satisfying way.

At the start of the book, we see six-year-old Patricia caring for a wounded bird, and then, somehow, realizing she can speak to it, and vice versa. Her new avian friend asks her to take him to the Parliament of Birds, which meets in a giant tree in the forest; there, the birds say she has to prove she’s a witch. One way of doing so, they say, is for them to ask her what they call the Endless Question, which turns out to be this: “Is a tree red?” Patricia asks for more time to answer, but then wakes up at the edge of the forest and gets taken home and locked in her room before she can figure out what her answer might be. Next, we meet Laurence, a geeky kid who’s figured out how to build a 2-second time-machine from plans on the internet, and who skips school to try to see a rocket launch. Then we jump forward: Patricia and Laurence are 13 and at the same school, where they’re both bullied incessantly. They become friends, sort of, but then both end up elsewhere for high school, though not before Laurence manages to build a supercomputer/AI in his closet, which Patricia helps shape by chatting with it. We jump forward again: Patricia and Laurence run into each other at a party in San Francisco, where they both live; they’re 23 now and the world is pretty much a mess, with climate change and pandemics and superstorms and threats of war. Laurence is working for an Elon-Musk-like tech genius who wants to colonize another planet; Patricia is trying to make things better for suffering individuals, through magic. Things happen, and they find themselves drawn together, while also apparently being on opposite sides in a conflict between science/technology and magic/nature. I don’t really want to say more about the plot—there’s a lot going on and I don’t know that I can adequately describe it without getting overly detailed—but I don’t think it’s too spoilery to say that Patricia and Laurence’s shared history makes them realize the falseness of the us-versus-them dichotomy in which they find themselves.

I like the way this book examines empathy, which seems in some ways to be at the core of how magic works (or can work)—there’s a scene in which Patricia does something magical, when she’s a kid, where the magic is brought about, basically, by imagination and empathy, but then also, later, there’s a scene in which Patricia and Laurence talk about how problematic it is that the most powerful witches are the ones who are, by circumstance, most removed from everyone else, most “set apart” (291). (And on the science/tech side, another character who has been working on emotional robots says she scrapped them because she realized that “We don’t need better communication from machines. We need people to have more empathy” (265).) Relatedly, I like how the book examines the limited nature of any one person’s perspective on anything, or any group’s: it’s there in the science-versus-magic conflict, and in an argument Patricia and Laurence have about the nature of ethics, and then again when Patricia finally answers the birds’ Endless Question.

Also: I love that this book includes a bookstore whose section labels are things like this (pp 159-167):
Exiles and Stowaways
Scary Love Stories
Parties That Already Ended
Ideas Too Good To Be True


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2 responses to “All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane AndersTor, 2016”

  1. Jenny @ Reading the End Avatar

    I LOVED the bookstore labels. I want to go to a bookstore that has labels like that! Especially “parties that already ended” being the section with all the books about fallen empires!

    1. Heather Avatar
      Heather

      Jenny, yes, so good! Also a bookstore with a secret absinthe bar sounds pretty excellent…

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