All the Birds performs its own kind of time travel. The story jumps ahead — first seven years, then 10 — until Patricia and Laurence are young adults, recently reunited after years of estrangement. In an indeterminate, near-future setting, the two rekindle their friendship, and perhaps something more, against a harrowing backdrop. Global catastrophes are brewing, and both Patricia and Laurence harbor secrets — one magical, one scientific … Huge questions of ethics and responsibility play into the plot as the apocalypse looms — conundrums that Anders raises with sensitivity, complexity, and a keen eye for the philosophical issues the human race faces as it ventures further into the future.
Charlie Jane Anders' brilliant, cross-genre novel All the Birds in the Sky has the hallmarks of an instant classic. It's a beautifully written, funny, tremendously moving tale that explodes the boundaries between science fiction and fantasy, YA and ‘mainstream’ fiction … Anders' humor elevates this marvelous book above the morass of dystopian novels that have flooded the literary landscape. So does her ability to portray a realistic yet original vision of the near-future … Anders weaves a thrilling, seat-of-the-pants narrative with a compelling subtext. Through Laurence and Patricia, she explores the tension between those who would exploit our world's increasingly limited natural resources to save humanity and those who believe that humanity isn't just part of the problem, it is the problem.
There’s a lot going on in this book. On the surface, it’s a chronicle of attempts to save the world from various slow-burn apocalypses: climate change, overpopulation, disease — basically the same nightmarish end-times scenarios that loom large in the public consciousness now, complicated by magic prophecies and theoretical physics. Beneath the surface, it’s the coming-of-age tale of Laurence, the aforementioned A.I. creator and scientific genius, and Patricia, a budding witch … The result is as hopeful as it is hilarious, and highly recommended.
Anders has created a special little confection here, a novel with a foot in both camps of science fiction and fantasy, and something that is greater than the sum of its parts … While parts of the book might feel familiar, the whole is completely Anders. She’s an important new voice in genre fiction and All The Birds In The Sky marks a brave, genre-bending debut that, as satisfying as it is, perhaps hints at even more greatness to come.
Anders has constructed a handsome and delightful novel that represents, intentionally and indirectly alike, the best that the genre has to offer. It’s grand and intimate at the same time, mundane and fabulous alike, livened up with the high-energy intensity and touch of the bizarre that is familiar from Anders’s short fiction as well … Anders has found a spectacular balance between the weirdness of her short fiction—sometimes baroque in its strangeness—and the rung-bell clarity of narrative prose in a novel-length structure … From a purely technical standpoint, it’s a hit out of the park—not least because it’s often dabbling in those familiar narratives of wizard-schools and singularity-seekers, twisting them around into something a bit more human and natural.
All the Birds in the Sky moves from a coming of age story to a millennial romance and then a dystopia — and it’s filled with so much of the uncanny. That includes, but is not limited to, a shapeshifting teacher, talking birds and an anti-gravity gun. The clutter should weigh it down, but it doesn’t, as the narrative flies gracefully through familiar territories of magic and science fiction … Filled with wacky and tender moments plus playful jabs at her characters, this book is a truly fun read that include references to geek culture favorites like Doctor Who and Red Dwarf...It’s a style she maintains even when she moves into a dystopian setting. The narrative becomes more chaotic, deadly and eventful but never slips too much into melodrama and is still filled with an abundance of wit.
A friendship between two adolescent misfits is the catalyst for an apocalyptic reckoning in Anders’s clever and wonderfully weird novel ... Talking animals and a sentient computer searching for love and understanding tighten the narrative strings. Fans of genre fiction will be delighted by Patricia and Laurence’s story, and Anders’s smart, matter-of-fact prose will appeal to a mainstream audience as well.
The author introduces technological and magical marvels in a wonderfully matter-of-fact way. But this lyrical pre-apocalyptic work has an edge, too. Laurence’s behavior is often far from noble. His colleagues use violence to defend their inventions, and Patricia’s compatriots employ some fairly creative, nasty solutions to people and things they deem problematic. Anders clearly has an intimate understanding of how hard it is to find friends when you’re perceived as 'different' as well as a sweeping sense of how nice it would be to solve large problems with a single solution (and how infrequently that succeeds).
