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.
into the spiderverse was a really good movie but that did not mean we needed every single production company to make a new multiverse
Isn’t it remarkable how, so frequently, those big budget studios completely fail to realize that what makes a movie succeed is good writing coupled with good performances? That’s the most basic of basics. Yet they always seem to walk away thinking it was some particular gimmick of the particular movie.
People watch tragedies on purpose. People watch stories about hope on purpose. Pulling the rug on the narrative promise of your story and switching tracks isn’t clever or interesting, it’s just lying about the genre.
If Midsummer Night’s Dream ended with everyone brutally dying, I’d feel kind of betrayed. If Macbeth ended with everyone getting happily married, I’d also feel kind of betrayed.
Yes! You have to earn your ending. They’re not supposed to be twists. They have to be built to throughout the story
You need to have the payoff match the kind of investment you set your audience up with.
To clarify, twists can be well done! But they shouldn’t be “Gotcha! You thought you were watching Type A show but you’re really watching Type B show!”
Like, the Red Wedding is an appropriate twist for Game of Thrones.
It would not be a good twist for something like Doctor Who.
Also, a good twist should feel random, but make sense in retrospect.
Watching Leverage can be a trip and a half. Especially because, like, how do all these people even find them? I mean, it’s kind of handwaved as Hardison’s computer algorithms and stuff finding them, but even so. And then! several people don’t want money, they want things like a horse, or even immaterial things like getting someone their self-esteem back. That’s some next-level shit right there.
Like, making deals with with the Fair Folk or demons type stuff.
Which means that the Leverage crew would be the demons/Fair Folk/supernatural entities having desperate people summon them, probably as a last-ditch desperation move they didn’t think would work.
Sophie is some sort of UnSeelie. She follows her rules and values manners and dispenses her kindnesses as she sees fit. Do not test her. You will not win.
Parker is a changeling, maybe. Or Seelie. Or maybe she’s just Parker, the only one of her kind. She hasn’t decided yet.
Nate is Human. An almost priest who hates himself and all his flaws and weaknesses while at the same time completely convinced of his own superiority. In the beginning anyway.
Eliot would have died years ago buy some unkind spirit liked his anger and blessed him and now he’s this sort of proto-god of soldiers who’s countries used them up and betrayed their ideals. He just doesn’t know it yet.
Hardison is something new. There is no word for him. He’s making a new world in which he will rule and he has no need at this time for a name or title.
When you cross the Threshold, you become something Other.
Fair Folk? Demigods? Archetypes? Perhaps.
The Threshold is always different. But when you return from it … you never really return. You are always Other. You are always Outside.
For those five, the Threshold was the warehouse explosion in the first episode.
And on the other side … no more petty cons and grifts. No more squalid thuggery. They have crystallized, become Archetypes: Grifter. Hacker. Hitter. Thief. Mastermind. Small gods? Perhaps, but most certainly Powers, dancing with ease on “alternative revenue streams” and even weirder magics.
Listen to their catch phrases. These are conjure words. Strange promises, barely comprehensible to their beneficiaries, whispering of justice in an unjust world, payment deferred or refused, because the true coin of their trade is payback.
“Let’s go steal fire from the gods.”
Oh my stars and garters, how much do I love the idea of the Leverage crew as small gods??? It is perfect and glorious! :D
*nodding vigorously*
Sans context… you tell me, would you expect this line to be coming from an entirely mundane insurance investigator, or from someone whose friends might be a little uncomfortable around iron and may or may not be holding a contract written in ink that seems to be smoldering on the page:
“People like that…corporations like that, they have all the money, they have all the power, and they use it to make people like you go away. Right now, you’re suffering under an enormous weight. We provide…Leverage.“
‘An alternative revenue stream’ he says, smirking at the private joke. Their accounts are balanced using the coin of an older realm. Yes by vengeance delivered, hubris crumbled, a brisk business in karmic debt-collection… but also the sense of despair and powerlessness their client no longer has need of, or a sliver of the hope they’ve stolen back for someone once robbed of it. They may not want your money, but they are well paid all the same.
It was the single worst thing that could have been said to the seven year-old. It was the word that undid linear time. It crippled the cosmos and brought reality to its knees like some forbidden, long-ago Netherese magic.
To counter this, Lirella did what any sane child of her rank and stature would do when faced with such cataclysmic cruelty. She threw herself to the floor with one heavy thwump and screamed. Great and powerful wails exploded through the walls of the Szarr family manor. No one could be certain her voice was strong enough to break the ornate glass windows, but shrill enough it was indeed. Her wrath was so that every spawn, near or far, shoved their hands to their ears and winced. Pain fluted through their ears in all the ringing melodies of her injustice.
