All the Birds in the Sky

This was a surprisingly weird book. It's a mix of urban fantasy, light science fiction, nonsense and disastrous futures. There's an AI, witches and mad scientists (sort of...). There is romance. Childhood adventures. Nerdy hipsters. Birds and trees talking. There are philosophical discussions about life, universe and everything. A clash of magic and science.

It's one of those books that can't really fit in one genre box. It's multi-genre (if such a classification exists). I enjoyed reading it mostly because of the unusual dialogues and crazy ideas. It reminded me a little bit of Douglas Adams's style (like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy).

The AI Peregrine was my favorite character. And in my head I was sure the AI was a female. But then later in the story I realized they actually called her with a masculine noun. Anyway, the genre doesn't matter at all, the AI was cool. I thought the best portions of the story were when Patricia and Laurence were having some existential discussion, like the end of the world.

At around 70% I thought the story dragged a little bit and it became a little depressing. But then the story picks up and extraordinary things happen.

It's an interesting mixed bag of magic and "sciency" near future story. To be read with an open mind.

This is a very weird book, where hard science and nature magic coexist in our world. I really enjoyed the first half of the book, which follows Laurence (bullied computer nerd science boy) and Patricia (bullied nature-loving witch girl) through high school and their abusive families. Seriously, why were both their families so awful? Roberta, Patricia's abusive and sadistic sister, reminded me of the seriously broken Peter Wiggin from "Ender's Game", yet this was never really dealt with in the slightest.

The second half of the book kind of fell apart, however. Both the science people and the magic people appear to be working on apocalyptic solutions to the approaching apocalypse caused by overpopulation, global warming, etc etc (because that totally makes sense?) while completely ignoring the possibility of trying to fix any part of what's going wrong. Patricia's fellow witches keep talking to her about avoiding "aggrandizement", which never really made sense and also never came to anything. There's a random assassin who shows up to make high school life difficult but then basically disappears and comes to nothing in the end. Inexplicable behaviour from various characters including Laurence and Patricia themselves (why, after encouraging her and wanting to see magic, would Laurence act the way he does?) And of course a requisite romance thread when Patricia and Laurence meet again in adult life, along with way too much irrelevant detail about what Laurence rather inexplicably does to his pubic hair (why??) The plot problems are of course solved in one easy scene when a main character is suddenly able to wield abilities they've never shown before, deus ex machina, and happily ever after, etc.

I did like the first half and found the writing easy to read and approachable, if a little inconsistent in style sometimes. Definitely felt as if the ending was more than a bit of a mess though and the whole thing lacked internal consistency.

This book was recommended to me, soon after I'd finished Robin Sloan's Sourdough, and then declared that modern-day magical realism was exactly the genre that meant the most to me, particularly the stories in which California-based millennials struggled to find humanity and meaning in a tech-centric world. It's a kind of science fiction where all the technobabble is familiar and real, but a dose of mysticism is needed to keep Silicon Valley palatable. Venture capitalists already believe in too many fairy tales.

All The Birds In the Sky is decidedly more magical than realism, and because it's more about the duality of magic and science, both worlds are represented more or less equally. The refreshing take here isn't that it's magic versus science, at odds with each other, forever warring for dominance and yet must be maintained in some kind of cosmic balance. Or even the Harry Potter version, where magicians exist in a fundamentally separatist society. Here the wizards just exist in the world in their own way, and the factions aren't sparring so much as they don't give a shit about each other, in much the way subcultures do when they have nothing in common.

Another fantastic element of the storytelling is the way Anders refuses to take her own writing seriously. Or, to put it another way, she is serious about not putting on the airs of someone writing genre fiction by pretending to do it in the voice of Tolkien or some other, more established writer from many decades ago. Anders writes the way you or I would be telling someone a story, today, which makes this book more a product of now, and not someone pretending to know what now sounds like, or someone cramming now into the mold of some other era. It's entirely possible that this is normal and I don't read enough stuff, but I felt like I don't see this often.

Some writers may tend to fall into a trap where the mystical elements are all about some kind of profound ancient wisdom guarded by witches and revealed for the benefit of the main characters' growth, but not Anders. Again, she keeps it simple, and therefore more real. People are just people trying to make it in life, whether they have magical powers or superhuman technical chops. Birds are just birds. In the first chapter, birds propose The Endless Question to Patricia, who has just learned she can understand and speak to animals and was led to the Parliament of Birds to be examined. She never finds an answer until the very end. This is going to be a spoiler, but it turns out there's nothing profound about the question, the answer, or even the entire process; it turns out the Parliament of Birds is just a government of birds who adhered to bylaws for no good reason other than that is the point of bylaws.

(Also there is more to the story than birds. Despite the title.)

The serious point that Anders does point to, gently at first, and then clearly toward the end of the book, is that the universe has a diversity of viewpoints and perspectives and as a result, even concepts that seem universal, like ethics, cannot be derived from first principles. If animals can speak and think, then even lofty, well-meaning goals about "saving humanity" seems treacherously narrow-minded. (Of course, the moral of the story is not that animals are people too, but whether individuals are willing to consider perspectives that they could not possibly have a personal frame of reference for.) In the end, Laurence, the white, male Silicon Valley wunderkind who represents a very particular Valley-inspired viewpoint on ethics, loses his ability to speak forever. It's a reminder that it's time for those who claim to speak for all of us, shut up and start to listen.