"All the Birds in the Sky" by Charlie Jane Anders (2016)

 **Is it a near-future tech scifi novel?  Is it a dark academia magic school novel?  Yes**

The premise is simple.  Elegant, really.  We have two childhood best friends, Patricia and Laurence.  Patricia realizes that she has magical powers, she can speak to birds and has other abilities.  Laurence is a supergenius in the classic scifi sense, building advanced gadgets as a young kid.  They get split up, and at this point the novel diverges into basically two completely different books told in alternating chapters:  Patricia ends up in a dark academia story, sent to a magical school where she learns magic and the secrets of the world; meanwhile, Laurence ends up in a day-after-tomorrow scifi story, where he invents increasing fantastic technological marvels

Patricia ends up part of a cabal dedicated to protecting the Earth:  “When the whole world turns chaotic, we must be the better part of chaos,” (man I love that line).  Laurence ends up part of a Silicon Valley collective trying to invent technology that will save the world:  "the whole point of being a grown-up and an uber-hacker is that you don’t get what you deserve. You get what you can get." (that said, even back in 2016, the idea of a Silicon Valley company making tech to save the world was presented with a sense of irony.  As I write this in 2025, that notion is even more a subject for . . . let's be polite and say "skepticism", because words like "ridicule" and "disdain" seem a little harsh)

This is all set against a backdrop of a world going increasingly wrong.  Climate change is accelerating beyond any notion of control, politics are destabilizing, the general feeling is that something is wrong and we don't know where we're going but we're sure as shit not optimistic about it (to reiterate, this novel was written in 2016.  We here in 2025 don't know anything about that . . .)

And what do we do?  How do we solve this problem?  How do a young witch and a young "uber-hacker", find ways to make a difference?  At its core, this is a story about doing your best, when the whole world seems crazy

I loved this story for so many reasons.  To start, I loved it immediately just for the sheer elegance of its concept.  As someone who loves both scifi and fantasy, getting to read both in the same book was a treat.  I'm happy to fragment into smaller sub-genres--hard scifi based on scientific principles; detailed fantasy with a carefully created magic system; space opera that's just adventure stories but with spaceships and rayguns; abstract fantasy where the magic exists beyond explanation; supernatural horror where we start in the real world until we are abruptly and terrifyingly not in the real world any more; magical realism that is basically speculative fiction's Trojan Horse into the world of "literary fiction"--but to be clear, that is purely for categorial purposes, I love them all equally and unreservedly.  I like to think Charlie Jan Anders would agree

But beyond the clever concept, this whole novel is a wonderful story about how difficult the world can be, and how we find ways to deal with that.  Although, as a side note, this story also contains one of the most devastating gut-punches of a passage I can recall:

“You never learned the secret,” said Roberta. “How to be a crazy motherfucker and get away with it. Everybody else does it. What, you didn’t think they were all sane, did you? Not a one of them. They’re all crazier than you and me put together. They just know how to fake it. You could too, but you’ve chosen to torture all of us instead. That’s the definition of evil right there: not faking it like everybody else. Because all of us crazy fuckers can’t stand it when someone else lets their crazy show. It’s like bugs under the skin. We have to destroy you. It’s nothing personal.”

Ow.  Fucking ow.  Ow, that hurts

(although to anyone who's reading this, perhaps any of my younger friends, going, "wait holy shit, is that true?  Is that really how the world works?"  I mean . . . kind of?  Everyone is struggling, yeah, I do think that's true.  Don't ever fall into the trap of comparing your insides to other people's outsides.  But . . . it's not as bad as that, it really isn't.  Own and accept your feelings, and you will absolutely find people who accept and love you)

In the end, though, this is a story about how none of us can be alone.  Or at least, how we shouldn't be alone.  It's a story about how the best of us always comes thanks to the people we have in our lives:

“You know … no matter what you do, people are going to expect you to be someone you’re not. But if you’re clever and lucky and work your butt off, then you get to be surrounded by people who expect you to be the person you wish you were.”

So.  Why am I writing this about for Pride Month?  That plotline seems pretty standard "boy meets girl, boy gets sent to abusive military academy and becomes a superhacker, girl gets sent to chaotic magical school and becomes a witch" story

I guess the missing puzzle piece is that Charlie Jane Anders is a very outspoken trans rights activist.  Anders has written many stories that are explicitly queer literature ("The City in the Middle of the Night" being particularly excellent), as well as articles, editorial work, and generally just being a champion.  So, in that sense, the themes of duality and division are fantastically important in this book

(oh, and the fact that both of these characters are people who were outcasts and pariahs in school, but went on to find communities where they felt accepted and understood . . . yeah.  Fair to say that that was heavily informed by Anders's queer childhood.  This whole novel can be read as one big "it gets better")

However, yes, the characters in this book spend a lot of time dividing things in half.  Science Fiction and Fantasy are two distinct genres and must be kept apart.  Men and Women, Mars and Venus, irreconcilably different.  Well, it turns out that the novel's conflict doesn't get resolved until, in a fairly unsubtle metaphor, Patricia and Laurence reunite, find each again in the midst of the chaos of the world, and work together to solve it

In the speculative fiction sphere, Anders is throwing cold water on the notion that "here is fantasy, here is science fiction, the two should be kept separate."  Hell, in a literary sense, Anders is also tackling the even more frustrating division, "here is genre fiction, here is literary fiction, ne'er the twain shall meet."  But in a societal sense, Anders has a lot to say about the notion, "here's what women are, here's what men are."  Anders is saying fuck that

And that makes this a wonderful, and important, novel

I loved this book

“Why would anybody be a Satanist, anyway? I don’t get it. You can’t believe in Satan without believing in God, and then you’re just picking the wrong side in a big mythic battle thing.” Everybody else had gone inside. They were ringing the second bell. 

“I guess if you’re a Satanist, you believe that God is the bad guy, and He rewrote history to make Himself look good.” [replied Laurence.]

“But if that’s true,” Patricia said, “then you’re just worshiping a guy who needs to get a better PR team.”