All the Birds in the Sky in The Sword and Laser

Jan 04, 2019 Shannon Clark rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Magical and geeky

Perhaps it is because I lived in SF (and full disclosure know the author and her partner slightly with many mutual friends) but this is a magical book about many things but deeply about the wonders you can find exploring SF on foot and at all hours of the day. That isn’t perhaps the main theme or plot of the book but it is woven throughout - a love of the obscure and yes magical and yet also weird and wonderful and geeky parts of SF. The green parrots and the hackerspaces, the ...more

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Mar 03, 2016 Jen rated it it was amazing

Magic and science blend together into a gorgeous ice cream sundae. I want to marry this book and have little book babies.

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Feb 11, 2017 Jessica Nickelsen rated it liked it

Tossing up between three and four stars. Four for a wonderfully realised world and future tech and magic system. An end-of-world scenario that rang true. And for some sincerely poignant moments as our two protagonists discover some life truths along the way.

But much of the relationship development (and description of) felt pretty awkward to me. I think this review stated it pretty well in terms of how the early-year YA tone, that felt right at the beginning of the book, made the second half, de ...more

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Jan 15, 2017 Jon added it · review of another edition

Shelves: ebooks, liked-it, fiction, science-fiction, read-in-my-50s, fantasy, philosophy

3.5 stars

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Dec 20, 2016 Michelle rated it did not like it

Shelves: 2016, fantasy, science-fiction, book-clubs, 2018, award-winner-nebula

I finished it this time! So I may very well do a full review at some point! The rating has not changed, however.
.....
Dec 2016
Hello DNF book #3...

I don't know if I'll do a full review of this because I ended up quitting after 200 pages in and then I just started skimming over the last third of the book so I would know what happened.

Occasionally you find books that you just loathed and everyone else seems to enjoy...and sometimes you find books that are the same way but make you question the valid ...more

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Mar 23, 2019 Anthony rated it it was ok

Shelves: fiction

I could not wait for this book to be over. It became a grind. I could only read one chapter a week because it would be too painful to read more. The characters were vapid. The romance between the two was forced as was the sex. The story line was just boring. The beginning had some promise and the assassin cracked me up but that was it. There were also sections of the book (side stories) that just didn't need to be included. This might be one of those love/hate books. Maybe you'll love it or mayb ...more

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Jun 25, 2017 Tom Britz rated it really liked it

This is a hard novel for me to describe. It is whimsical and serious, it is science fiction and also fantasy, it is a novel of ideas and a sort of love story. I got the impression that it was written for the pink haired millenials as much as for the free thinking oldsters that are not tied down by belief in a certain approach to life's problems.
It is the story of two disenfranchised kids, the outcasts with no friends and whose own parents don't know how to deal with. The girl Patricia, is a witc This is a hard novel for me to describe. It is whimsical and serious, it is science fiction and also fantasy, it is a novel of ideas and a sort of love story. I got the impression that it was written for the pink haired millenials as much as for the free thinking oldsters that are not tied down by belief in a certain approach to life's problems.
It is the story of two disenfranchised kids, the outcasts with no friends and whose own parents don't know how to deal with. The girl Patricia, is a witch, with no training and no power at her control, the boy Laurence, never Larry, is a scientific nerd that has created his own two second time machine from scratch. This not being enough to deal with, they also have an assassin after them who wants to destroy them because of a vision he had of them destroying the world in the future. Their school days made mine look like Sunnybrook Farm, and mine sucked.
Then the story fast forwards to them in their early to mid twenties. By now Patricia has had training and is a quite powerful witch working with nature, healing people and of course getting in trouble with her peers. Laurence is a scientific marvel and it working on solving the problem of humankind destroying itself prematurely. The Assassin makes a brief return, only to be turned into a wooden medallion.
The world is in dire straits, what with war and ecological disaster looming. Laurence and his group are trying to build a wormhole to allow mankind, or at least a portion of it to escape to a new world, while the witches have their own agenda and view of mankind's future. Needless to say they are not compatible. So now, not only is the world teading on the brink of warfare and collapse, these two factions in their blind faith of having the only true answer are also warring it out.
There is a inevitable clash and all hell breaks loose, then there is a denouement that is both kind of unbelievable, yet also foreshadowed.
There were parts of this novel I liked, and others that were hard to swallow, it was just not something I usually read. It did win this years Nebula Award, which is why I read it. ...more

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Jul 13, 2017 Tensy (bookdoyen) rated it did not like it

Shelves: ya-young-adult, fantasy, did-not-finish

I read about 50 pages and gave up. I am just not a fan of the fantasy genre and, although this had been recommend by several people, I thought the writing was sub-par and the dialogue between the main characters was awkwardly written.

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Jun 30, 2018 Jon added it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, fantasy, science-fiction, audiobooks, lcl-adult-book-club, sword-challenge-2018

Re-reading this by listening to the audiobook to check off the "Read the first book in a series" Adult Summer Reading Challenge and it also happens to be the June/July selection for the LCL Adult Book Group. ...more

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