All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders Sunday Book Circle - Part I
All the Birdds in the Sky follows Patricia and Laurence from childhood into young adulthood as their weirdness brings them closer together as kids. But their weirdness being so different also drives them along different life paths and into an all out war—that’s not a euphemism—which threatens the earth and humanity.
I like All the Birds in the Sky because unlike a lot of novels, it has an actual plot. There’s never a point where I’m like “will anything ever happen?” It starts with very mundane childhood concerns, sticking out, finding friends, parents not getting you, and neatly ramps up to world-ending possibilities. I love that. It reminds me of the TV show Person of Interest that started out as a case of the week kind of show and ended up with an epic, world-changing plot in five sweet seasons. So not only does All the Birds in the Sky have a plot, which is shockingly rare these days, it also has great pacing of that plot. It’s crazy that these two things excite me now. I usually only see a plot and good pacing in old books or romance novels these days. All the Birds in the Sky is almost a genre novel, so that could be why it has a plot. Most genre fiction still ends up with a plot. But All the Birds in the Sky is sci-fi and fantasy, but that doesn’t really make it urban fantasy. It’s not the Dresden Files. It’s more reminiscent of Neil Gaiman and Michael Reaves’ Interworld, which I read close to twenty years ago (Jesus, when did I get so old?).
The plot of All the Birds in the Sky has to do with the clash of magic and science. Magic values the earth and the other life on it. Science values humanity. In the real world, I’d say scientists are more like the magic faction these days, discounting the significance of human life. The point of the novel is a good one though. Both sides are wrong, because both are undervaluing something important. I like this more balanced approach. I like balanced approaches to most issues. I don’t think humans should suffer for the preservation of nature, but I also don’t think we should abuse nature to the point of it falling apart on us, which is also a selfish stance as well when one takes the long view. Humans shouldn’t have their freedoms or dreams sacrificed on the altar of the greater good, even if that greater good is the environment, because we all only get one chance in this world. We shouldn’t make a mess we can’t clean up, but we also shouldn’t forget to live while we have a chance.
Environmentalism is a boondoggle these days. Most of the technology that corporations, billionaires, and politicians promote is not good for the environment. It’s about making money or taking control of other peoples’ lives. It’s about getting the masses to do the bear minimum and feel good about it, as if not using disposable straws changes anything when the majority of the trash in the ocean is from commercial fishing nets or into getting them to support a prop to build windmills that need their non-recyclable blades replaced regularly. It’s just so someone can make money.
At the same time, too many on the side of science and technology believe in Malthusianism, which made no sense when Malthus came up with it. The population of humanity did not outpace our ability to produce food and the technology to produce food has been improving the amount of food produced every year. Malthus acted as though we would never improve food production as if we hadn’t already and that he couldn’t extrapolate from that fact that we would continue to improve food production. But so many scientists believe in his incredibly flawed idea and think it is something we need to fix by curtailing the population. This is why I don’t trust a lot of the major movers and shakers of society’s motivations. One thing Anders gets very right in the novel is that people at the top are removed from humanity, by dint of their power, and can’t possibly see how what they’re doing is bad for humanity, how it is ethically wrong. The reason is that they cannot connect to people in any normal way and have a social constructionist bent that means they think they have the right and the obligation to fix the ills of humanity. Well, guess what? So did Hitler.
And that’s the real problem with disconnecting from humanity and the world, you become a monster to humanity and the world while thinking you’re doing both a favor. Part of it is sadism and megalomania, but because these people are also so smart, conceivably the smartest people in the world—after all, how else did they amass so much power?—they think there’s no way that they could possibly be motivated by something as base as emotional compulsions like gratification at the pain of others or the control over huge populations of people. Well, guess what? So did Stalin. Even when they are science-minded, they end up practicing Lysenkoism, because power and pain are their real motivators. Most evil people don’t think they’re evil. They don’t walk around twirling their mustaches. They don’t write hateful vitriol on the internet. They make speeches about the greatest good for the greatest number of people and then march people up against the wall who would stand in the way of their great vision of a better humanity. So beware of people who speak from the shaky foundations of moral superiority of a better tomorrow and promising gifts because that better tomorrow is littered with corpses and destroyed dreams and those gifts are broken and come with chains.
Join the community to read the rest of the review!
