All the Birds in the Sky

I picked this book up in my local book store while on a quest to find something to restart my love of reading. A year plus of near complete isolation during the onset of the pandemic led me to rely increasingly more on my phone for bursts of serotonin and I wound up wrecking my focus. Standing in the book store, I figured anything in the sci-fi section would do the trick - it’s worked in the past. I wound up purchasing AtBinS solely on the cover art not knowing anything about the story or the author. The book sat among my looming “to-read” pile for months until I was several days deep into a week long vacation. I figured it couldn’t to take an hour away from my phone, and by the time I looked up from the book over an hour had passed. I finished the book the next day in a 5-hour marathon that kept me up til midnight. Judging by the GoodReads reviews, this book is not everyone’s cup of tea, but it was the exact kind of magical-realism sci-fi witchy tech-y love story that I needed to rekindle my love of reading.

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.