#apocalyptic books

ALL THE BIRDS IN THE SKY by Charlie Jane Anders

I bought All the Bird in the Sky for a friend. Her bookclub vetoed this as a book suggestion, but she was excited about it, so in an act of solidarity with her deeply-rooted belief that books should be worthy of discussion, I deposited it on her bed one day and blamed book fairies for the drop. 

Then I promptly started reading it myself and stole it across the country with me before she could open it. (I had the best intentions. Also, spending money on a book purchased for a friend does not count as buying a book for yourself.)

A unique combination of the post-apocalyptic world of Vanessa Vaselka’s ZAZEN and the gritty magical reality of Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, Anders’ novel is possibly the only book that would be accurately categorized as Sci-Fi/ Fantasy. 

(There is this odd phenomenon - a bizarre combination of sci-fi and fantasy genres - that proliferates search engines and bookstores alike. It’d be like grouping cats and dogs together in a shelter section called Dats and considering the choice between the two arbitrary - which any cat or dog parent will indubitably dispute. But, this book is truly both Sci-Fi and Fantasy.) 

In the rich world Anders has invented, thick with angst and dense with meaning, a 2-second time travel device and talking animals coexist. It’s nostalgic and dread-filled, a children’s book for adults, an embedded warning for our collective future.  

Turning each page sounds the death nell for the end of the world - or a solemn harbinger for science that contains real magic - or is it magic that contains real science?  - that will save us all.