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All the Birds in the Sky


Tor
Fiction, Fantasy/Sci-Fi
Themes: Apocalypse, Artificial Intelligence, Avians, Cross-Genre, Diversity, Girl Power, Plants, Weirdness, Witches
**

Description

Patricia was an ordinary young girl until she spoke with a bird and learned she must be a witch. Laurence found plans online for a two-second time machine, beginning a lifelong love affair with technology. They met as fellow outcasts in school, bonding through misery, but their lives would soon veer in radically different directions... and, if one assassin's vision is correct, the two will one day bring about the end of the world in a cataclysmic confrontation between magic and science.

Review

When a story threatens to end the world and kill the characters it has painstakingly created in my imagination, and my reaction as a reader is to cheer on the apocalypse, something has gone wrong.
Just when All the Birds in the Sky lost me is difficult to pin down, but tremors could be felt early. Both Laurence and Patricia come from miserable homes with parents whose sole goal seems to be thwarting their children's dreams and any chance they have to find happiness, misery that takes on a surreal air in a world that contains both impossible magic and near-future technology. At first, I wanted to like them, but soon Laurence and then Patricia devolve into self-described assholes, prone to terrible attitudes, weaselly actions, and general spinelessness, not to mention major bouts of amnesia that, I guess, were supposed to wipe my mind too of major developments; that's the only reason I could think of for the plot-extending lapses, unless the author wanted me to spend half the book shouting angrily at the characters (figuratively, of course - though I came close to actual outbursts a time or two when they stretched my already-thin suspension of disbelief too far).
The setting retains a dreamlike quality throughout, with the public world of technology being every bit as exaggerated and implausible as the hidden world of magic. Both are populated with swarms of characters I often couldn't keep straight, all of whom are broken and cold and manipulative in their own ways, not to mention swarming with red herrings that nibble up too much page time simply to drive home the fact that society is broken beyond all reasonable hope of repair. Even the birds are jerks, here. (How bad does a world have to be that I don't even care if the birds survive?)
In any event, the plot crawls and lurches between prolonged bouts of whining and self-destructive behavior by Laurence and Patricia as everything inches toward the prophesied apocalypse, reliant on forced circumstances and deliberately botched efforts at communication to ratchet up tension and stakes... though, as I mentioned earlier, the stakes failed to ratchet up that high for me owing to the fact that I would've been just as happy seeing the lot of them fall into a bottomless pit.
Skirting spoilers, by the end I was half-convinced that I was never really supposed to like or even believe in the world the characters inhabited as anything but a metaphor. Which is fine, if that's what one likes. There are some interesting images and nice ideas at play here that I haven't seen before, but the ideas alone couldn't make me care about the book when I couldn't care about the characters or believe their situations. This just isn't the kind of story I enjoy reading, and not the kind I intend to read again if I can at all help it.

 

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Never Say You Can't Survive: How to Get Through Hard Times By Making Up Stories


Tordotcom
Nonfiction, Essays/Memoir/Writing
Themes: Cross-Genre, Diversity, Girl Power
****

Description

These are trying times, no doubt about it. For many, the very foundations of our reality and the most basic things we have taken for granted have been snatched away, twisted beyond recognition or just plain smashed to pieces. It's tempting to just give up, to decide that there's no point in even trying to do something so seemingly frivolous as write or create. That, argues author Charlie Jane Anders, is precisely what one shouldn't do. This collection of essays covers a range of topics, from basic writing advice to using despair and anger to fuel creativity to understanding that creating escapes from reality and visions of other possible worlds is anything but a waste of time, even in times like these.

Review

I've only read a few of Anders's works; while I like the ideas she explores, I find the stories themselves a bit hit-and-miss for my tastes. That said, I rather enjoyed this collection of essays about keeping the will to write alive even when so much is going so very, very wrong in the world. The writing advice itself is not altogether different from stuff I've picked up elsewhere, if delivered with solid style. The rest, particularly on perseverance though trying and dangerous times and learning to value one's own creativity even when the world at large diminishes it, is fresh and timely and well written (or spoken, as I listened to the audiobook version).

 

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