As I was reading Charlie Jane Anders’ sparkling debut novel, All the Birds in the Sky, Elon Musk released the first photos of his gigantic Gigafactory, the latest stage in his plan to save humanity from climate change.
A few weeks later, with no apparent sense of contradiction, he tested a capsule from one of his extravagantly polluting rockets, what he calls his "escape hatch" in case we need to flee the Earth.
Tech culture’s strange relationship with nature takes centre stage in All the Birds in the Sky, a vivid, genre-blending novel from a writer who is clearly one to watch. Jumping skillfully from science fiction to fantasy and back again, Anders tells the story of a witch who falls in love with a scientist. "I’m kind of obsessed with how we’re going to reconcile technology and nature," Anders tells WIRED. "This book was about hopefully showing how those two things do go together in some ways."
The witch of All the Birds in the Sky is Patricia Delfine. We meet her first as a child: sensitive, talented, but "already turning into the girl the other girls wouldn’t sit with, because she was too hyper, made nonsense jokes, and wept when anybody’s balloon (not just her own) got popped."
At the same time, "science geek" Laurence Armstead is developing his own precocious gifts. His talent, however, leads in a darker direction: he looks at the natural world and sees it as something to be used. "Your friend wants to conquer nature," Patricia is warned.
Anders has a light, inventive touch with dialogue and description, but when Patricia and Laurence form a tentative bond -- "the only two weirdos at this awful meat locker of a school" – All The Birds in the Sky appears to be heading in a conventional direction. (The decision to gender typecast adds to the impression: Anders, who is a prominent trans activist, says she "worried a lot about playing into expectations".) It is when the action shifts to San Francisco, picking up Laurence and Patricia as early twenty-somethings, that the story comes brilliantly to life.
In this plague-ridden, climate change-befouled near future, Patricia is a magical adept who heals people at night while waitressing at tech launches during the day. (Even witches have to pay rent.) It is at one of these gigs that she spots Laurence, now working on the secretive Ten Percent Project, a domineering tech billionaire’s plan to save humanity by sending 10 per cent of Earth's population into space. "We’ve got to get off this rock," proclaims Laurence. "All our models suggest a decent likelihood of a catastrophic combination of natural disasters and destructive war, within one or two generations." "This planet is not just some ‘rock’," replies Patricia. "It’s not just some kind of chrysalis we can shed, either. You know? It’s, it’s more than that. It’s us. And this isn’t just our story. As someone who’s spoken to lots of other kinds of creatures, I kind think they might want a vote."
Anders is editor of io9, Gawker Media's influential science-fiction and fantasy review site. She understands both the utility of genres and their ultimate irrelevance. "I love the versatility of genres, especially in the early 21st century when we are so familiar with them,” she says. "Everybody has seen a million spy-with-gadgets movies and read a million gritty urban fantasy novels, and we kind of know what to expect from them. Which means that you can have a bit of fun playing with the reader's expectations." "But that can be kind of a double-edged sword, because the more you think of your story as either fulfilling or subverting expectations, the less you are able to just break free and tell a story that's grounded in reality."
Reviewers of All the Birds in the Sky have noted the similarity between Anders and Lev Grossman, author of The Magicians. But her knowing wisdom bears more resemblance to Jennifer Egan, another ingenious writer of immediate futures. Both have the ability to take the present and twist it just enough to make it strange. Both share the understanding that technology cannot be separated from the people who use it.
Whereas Egan is very much a writer of New York, however, Anders is rooted in San Francisco, and the dual nature of that city -- hippy haven, then tech mecca -- runs through All The Birds in the Sky like a golden thread. "I wasn’t explicitly writing about San Francisco when I wrote the book, but it inevitably is in there," she says. "Both of those transformations have been really fascinating and have had a lot to offer. It’s interesting to see how they come together."
As All the Birds in the Sky rushes to completion, Anders puts Laurence and Patricia through their paces -- arguing, falling in love, being torn apart -- without ever making them tools of the theme. This is a love story, after all, not a philosophical treatise.
Yet the broader questions resound as fully as the characters. Anders has the ability to open up complicated questions, finding resolution without reaching prematurely for closure. She helps illuminate a world in which technology is both saviour and destroyer, and "every designer of cool hardware" ends up "reaching for shapes from nature". Even Elon Musk.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
