All the Birds in the Sky
by Charlie Jane Anders
Summary
Patricia Delfine talks to a bird when she is six and is told she is a witch. Laurence Armstead builds a two second time machine out of a wristwatch in the same year and later an artificial intelligence in his bedroom closet. They meet at middle school, where both are relentlessly bullied and neither can help the other, and their friendship is repeatedly wrecked by adults with agendas, including an assassin working as a guidance counsellor.
As adults they end up on opposite sides of the same catastrophe. Patricia belongs to a network of magicians quietly repairing the world one intervention at a time, bound by a rule against showing off. Laurence works for a Silicon Valley outfit building a wormhole device to evacuate a chosen few off a dying Earth. Both are certain the other side is going to destroy everything.
Anders writes the two modes in their own registers, fairy tale for Patricia and start up satire for Laurence, and the satire is very funny about a certain kind of technologist.
The romance is genuinely earned and the ending goes somewhere neither faction planned.
The childhood section is the strongest and the hardest to read. Anders is exact about the particular helplessness of being twelve, hated, and unable to explain yourself to a single adult in the building.
Around three hundred and twenty pages, tonally restless, and deliberately refusing to settle into either genre for more than a chapter.
Readers who want a consistent register will find it uneven, and the ending asks for a fair amount of goodwill. Best for readers who like science fiction and fantasy equally and enjoy watching them argue with each other.
Historical Context & Significance
All the Birds in the Sky won the 2016 Nebula Award for Best Novel, the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel and the Crawford Award, and was a finalist for the Hugo.
Charlie Jane Anders had spent years as the editor of io9, the science fiction site, before writing it, which shows in a book that is fluent in both genres and slightly impatient with the boundary between them.
Its central quarrel, between people who think the planet is saved by technological escape and people who think it is saved by care and repair, was already the argument of the decade in Silicon Valley when the novel appeared, and it has not become less current since.
Anders is a transgender woman and has been one of the more visible advocates in the field for the last decade. She has since published the Unstoppable trilogy for younger readers and a book about writing as a way through hard times, Never Say You Can't Survive.