Book Review: All the Birds in the Sky

Machines vs. nature, maybe? That’s what’s at stake in Charlie Jane Anders’ 2016 science fiction novel, All the Bird in the Sky, or at least, that’s how it appears at first. This book is a blend of near-future science fiction with magical realism, and is so weird in the best way, primarily because it achieved the two best qualities a book can possess: a.) be entertaining, and b.) make you think. Plus, coming off of Jericho, I got to continue my dive into witches and witchcraft.

Patricia is a witch, who can talk to birds and the cat who wants to eat them, and seemingly a magical tree. She’s also earnest to a fault, but like any great fantasy protagonist, she’s punished by her parents with depraved cruelty (they lock her in her room and slide food under the door) because they don’t get her. Likewise, Laurence (spelled with a “u” and not a “w,” he tells us, and he definitely does not go by Larry), who, as an adolescent, invents a time machine that can take him two seconds into the future and an artificial intelligence that comes into play later in the story, is seen by his parents as a hermit who needs to be more outdoorsy. That’s where Patricia comes in, and they compliment each other: She finds solace in someone who doesn’t think she’s weird, and he finds someone who can cover for him that he is being outdoorsy when he’s still being sciency.

After a 10-year time jump, Patricia has gone through magic school, and we learn that there were two schools of magic that nearly fought a catastrophic war until merging: Healers and Tricksters. It took one the witches to make everyone realize that healers needed some tricks and tricksters needed some healing. That’s a metaphor for the larger story Anders is telling, at least as I interpret it. And Laurence is helping a billionaire with his 10 Percent Project, which is a project aimed at getting 10 percent of Earth’s population to another habitable planet, likely by crossing through a wormhole.

The problem with that plan? Well, for starters, as the seemingly magical tree warned Patricia when she was six, we are not meant to control nature, but serve it. But also, the scientists realize that there’s a good chance when “turning on” the wormhole, they’ll destroy the Earth, and then it becomes a game of shuffling as many people through the wormhole before that occurs. Naturally (heh), the billionaire thinks that’s probably still worth doing.

See the conflict here? Much like the conflict between the magicians, there is a conflict between magicians and scientists, between Patricia’s people and Laurence’s, between controlling nature and serving it, and between centering humans as the most important point of survival versus all of Earth’s creatures, including Earth itself as our home. This creates tension not just between Patricia and Laurence, as they become friends and then lovers and then hate each other after the magicians destroy the wormhole machine, but as is obvious, between the magicians and the scientists, leading to a bloody attack from the scientists on the magicians at the end of the book. That’s when Patricia and Laurence come back together, thanks to Laurence’s artificial intelligence, which has become a portable match-making app (because the poor AI is lonely and wants to find love). They visit the tree, and Laurence has the epiphany that was in plain sight all along: like healers and tricksters being stronger together, the way forward for Earth is by forging an alliance between magic and science. He puts the AI within the tree, and the AI and the tree learn what love is, and that their “roots” and “neural networks” are similar. This is the way forward.

In fact, Patricia had this epiphany, perhaps with the fuller implications unbeknownst to her, earlier in the book, when she observed about Laurence and humans, “But maybe Laurence had been right and these devices were what made us unique, as humans. We made machines, the way spiders made silk.” The question, of course, as Patricia and Laurence debate throughout the book, is what we do with what we create, i.e., how ethics comes to bear on our decision-making, or at least, how ethical considerations ought to come to bear on our decision-making.

Aside from these weighty themes, the enthralling weirdness, and the pitch-perfect way Anders writes Patricia and Laurence as children — I always appreciate an author who can do this because it’s not easy — is that Anders’ book is also hilarious with funny asides and observations and awkwardness you’d find with a budding witch and a “wunderkind.” Even if you strip away the weightier themes, there’s a coming-of-age story here in the first half of the book everyone can relate to. As Patricia remarks at one point (to paraphrase), a society who seeks to burn witches, like her, has already failed and just doesn’t know it yet. Take witches and apply it to “X” in society that’s received castigation, including, back in the day, women perceived as witches, and that’s your moral of the story.

Without a doubt, Anders’ book is sure to be the weirdest read of 2023 for me, and I delight in that being the case. If you’re game for something off-the-wall, but with crucial thought-provoking ideas, then I highly recommend giving Anders’ book a read.