Doug Lewars's Blog - Posts Tagged "sci-fi-fantasy"

All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


*** Possible Spoilers ***

This book won an award. I'm not entirely certain that it should have won an award but it did. I think they may have given it the award because this is one of the few books that has ever attempted to blend Science Fiction and Fantasy.

Basically the theme is that no matter how much chaos there is in the world and no matter the degree to which life and civilization is trembling on the brink, a good AI system coupled with a bit of magic can fix it ... well, maybe.

Technology is threatening to destroy the world. Magic is threatening to destroy the world. Blend them together and the world suddenly has a future. In addition, love conquers all. That's not bad for one book. Admittedly the ending is a little ambiguous. Things are supposed to be on the cusp of being saved but we don't know that they will be. Maybe the whole thing will blue-screen.

Anyway I think the book is fun to read. I've read better. I've read worse. I certainly don't regret the time I've invested in reading it so that's something. Plus it's educational as well. I now know not to believe everything a bird tells me. They don't necessarily lie. It's just that they do have ... well, bird brains.

I read some criticism that the dialogue was stilted. There is some truth to that but the main characters are fairly well done. The supporting characters seem to be placeholders. There are two sets of parents who are unbelievable and the bullies in the school are two-dimensional. Also there is one individual introduced early in the story who receives an impressive build-up and then amounts to nothing more than a plot device.

Certainly this book is not without its faults. It might be classified as Young-Adult except for the sex scene but I suppose that the author figured that anyone over the age of ten probably knows more about sex than their parents so she threw it in. The trouble with sex scenes is that they're hard to write without making them boring and, while this author did her best, those were a few pages you can just bleep over without losing anything of significance.

The highlight of the entire book for me was the riddle - not the one the tree asks but the one that Laurence asks. Anyway if you like both science fiction and fantasy and don't mind a few two-dimensional characters then this is a pretty good book.



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