Most people likely know Charlie Jane Anders as the editor of io9, the great science fiction, science, fantasy, futurism and technology blog. From this point forward, though, she might be best known as the author of the terrific new novel “All the Birds in the Sky.” This novel isn’t Anders first work of fiction. She’s a prolific short story writer and won a Hugo Award for her novelette “Six Months, Three Days,” which was originally published on tor.com.
“All the Birds in the Sky” is a book about a magician and a scientist who meet in middle school as fellow oddballs and outcasts, and then meet again in San Francisco at the possible end of the world. It’s about battles between technologies and ideologies, but at its heart, it’s a love story about two people saving the world. We spoke recently about the book, getting the science right, the importance of whimsy, and what Buffy taught us.
ALEX DUEBEN: I know that the book has just come out and you’ve started doing book events. What has the response to the book been like so far?
CHARLIE JANE ANDERS: So far the response has been terrific. I’ve been blown away. People seem to really be connecting with the book. I figured it would be a mixture of people going, what the hell is this, and then some people really getting into it, and it’s been much more weighted towards people really getting into it. It’s a weird book that does some unusual things and people seem to be really responding to that, which makes me personally happy about this book–but also makes me have more faith in book readers generally and their ability to embrace new and different things. I don’t want to oversell the oh my god this book is a weird experimental thing, but it’s a book that does certain things that are a little bit unusual.
AD: You wrote a post on io9 about the book and the headline was “I wrote a weird book about two people who belong in different stories.” When I tell people it’s about a scientist and magician who knew each other when they were middle school outcasts and meet again as adults at the possible end of the world, everyone knows what kind of book that is and whether they’ll be into it or not
CJA: I think that’s good. As long as people have some sense of what to expect and the book is kind of doesn’t go too far from that, that’s good. Some people it’s not going to be their cup of tea and that’s totally fine. I think it’s good that different people have different books that they like. I think that’s awesome.
AD: Where did this story begin?
CJA: I was working on a different novel which was completely different. Sometimes you’re working on a book and you have an idea that comes into your head and even though you’re already working on something, you can’t get back to it until you write down the idea that came into your head. What I wrote down was this idea about a witch and a mad scientist. I think I originally thought of it that they were enemies or rivals and there was going to be all this zany stuff with them fighting each other so it’s ray gun vs. wand and flying carpet vs. rocket car and spell book vs. super computer. I just wrote a bunch of crazy ideas and then went back to the other project, which ended up not ever going anywhere. I came back to this idea and kept working on it. Every time I tried to write this zany book that was full of crazy ideas everywhere and loopy humor I kept thinking of it more as a relationship story. These two characters who are kind of friends but have a really complicated relationship
I wrote this story Six Months, Three Days, which is all about this relationship between two different people who can see the future and they see the future in different ways. I wrote that and that was a new thing for me and the response to that was really terrific. People just really responded to that story. I started looking at All the Birds in the Sky, which at the time had a different title, and going, this could be a lot more like Six Months, Three Days. Not in a crass way, but it seemed to be the natural way for this novel to go as well and so it all made sense to me then.
AD: There’s a line that Laurence has at the end, “she and I are bound together, like she and I are broken in different but compatible ways,” which is a great relationship of relationships, but I was struck because it came after Patricia has this realization that all magic has to do with interactions with people, but magicians are horrible with people.
CJA: That came to me as I was writing that scene. In rewriting the book and trying to shape it, one of the things that came to me is there are two running themes in the book. One of the themes that’s super-obvious is nature and how we relate to nature but the other theme is a little more under the surface is trying to figure out how to relate to society and other people. How to be connected to people in a meaningful way. That’s a thing that I feel like when that keeps bumping against the theme about nature. There are so many different ways in which the book brings the idea of everybody being connected and trying to figure out how you belong and how you fit with other people. I think that’s almost as big a theme as nature. When I realized that it felt like a little bit of a light bulb because there’s a lot of stuff with Laurence and Patricia and their relationship that’s about the two of them having problems with the rest of the world and finding that they can communicate in a different way.
AD: Each of them is brought up in a school of thought which has a different idea about human beings relationship to nature and their own relationships to other people. In the end they both understand these ideas are incomplete.
CJA: Exactly. Any worldview is going to be incomplete. It’s going to be skewed and limited and have huge blind spots. I was heavily influenced a long time ago by Sherwood Anderson’s book Winesburg, Ohio, which is all about people who have a worldview that is very limited and narrow. He explains at the start of the book that what makes you into what he calls a grotesque is if you find the way of looking at the world that makes sense and these are the bad people and these are the good people. That this is how the world works and you just stick to that one idea about the world over time. That turns you into a kind of monster.
AD: Like a lot of people I know you mostly from your work at io9. The first or one of the first works of fiction I read of yours was in the Hieroglyph anthology, which came out a couple years ago. Could you talk a little about what that was?
CJA: Hieroglyph kind of started because of Neal Stephenson. He gave a barn-burning, fiery talk about the notion that science fiction needed to be more optimistic and more proactive and solution oriented. Basically if science fiction is in some sense an R&D lab for actual science and technology, and also inspiration for people to create new science and technology, then we’re falling down on the job. The genre needs to be innovating more and inventing new ideas about how we can do things in the future. Also just having optimism about the future and thinking about the future as something that can be awesome rather than this gloomy pessimistic dystopian apocalyptic view of everything. This was a speech that got a lot of attention and the folks at Arizona State University, who have a center that deals with the intersection between science and science fiction, decided to do a book project of optimistic, solution-oriented, upbeat science fiction stories.
I had a story I was already working on which actually had some dystopian, apocalyptic elements in it, but then it turns out that there are solutions and there are opportunities to fix things. I wanted the story to be almost pulling the rug out from under the reader. Suddenly these things you thought were dystopian are actually hopeful and exciting because secretly all these scientists have working on ways to fix things. It’s a weird fantasy about how that could happen. I’ve written about this on io9 lately. Optimism doesn’t mean that you ignore the potential disasters that could be in our future, including climate related disasters and various other ecological and systemic problems. Being optimistic means you face up to the potential problems and you imagine us dealing with them. You imagine us actually being able to cope with a difficult future. I don’t think optimism means that you just have to imagine that there’s going to be candy floss everywhere and we’re all going to go to sugar mountain and it’s all going to be wonderful.
AD: I bring it up because I kept thinking of some of those ideas and some of that approach circling All the Birds in the Sky.
CJA: I’ve been really grateful that so many people have described All the Birds in the Sky as an optimistic novel. I think it’s an optimistic novel. It does have some apocalyptic stuff. I actually got a little worried when my publisher mentioned the A-word in the book’s official synopsis. People are going to see the word apocalypse and see it as another The Road or California or Station Eleven. I love those books but this book is not like that. I think that there is a certain weariness about apocalyptic stories. I keep telling people it’s more like a Buffy apocalypse. The apocalypse is happening and we have to stop it. I think that’s a valuable thing that fiction can do, imagine us actually trying to stop the apocalypse.
AD: Which doesn’t mean that nobody dies and everyone’s happy, but we do have agency and power and can prevent the worst. As Buffy taught us.
CJA: Exactly.
AD: I was curious about that because one aspect of the Hieroglyph project was that every writer consulted scientists and cited journal articles that played a role in the piece. Did you do something similar in this book?
CJA: I did and the acknowledgements section has a long long list of scientists and other experts that I talked to. The Hieroglyph project helped me to realize that I could actually talk to scientists about science fiction that I was working on. I had already done it some before the Hieroglyph project. There are some scientists I know through io9 who were willing to talk to me for books that I was working on and stories that I was working on, but after Hieroglyph I was like, this is something that I can actually do. It was really neat to say, I’ve got this idea, a device that does xyz, how do we make that plausible? You talk to five different scientists and they all have different points of view, but you get a sense that this is off the table. Other things, there’s a few different ways it could work and it depends on other factors. In some ways it makes the story more complicated or adds some wrinkles to it because you have this perfect device that you thought of, but I think it makes the story more interesting. Anything that makes your characters have to work a little bit harder is better for your story. What I found is that having more accurate science is good for storytelling because it adds to the challenges that the characters are dealing with. It also adds another layer of believability and makes things emotionally more interesting and more accessible, if that makes any sense, because you feel that the characters believe in it and so you do as well.
AD: I think it does. There’s a scene where Patricia saves Priya and one characters asks, how did you do that? Patricia gives an answer using all these phrases and one character goes, that’s a thing from Doctor Who. You don’t spend five pages explaining this device in depth, but you convey that it is a real thing and not magic.
CJA: Right. I think that having the science be as real as I could make it helped to increase the contrast with the magic in the book. The magic–while hopefully feeling real and grounded and part of a world that you could believe in–it’s fantastical and it doesn’t obey the laws of physics or any other laws of science. What I found is if you just go full on comic book science like “I used my whiz-o-mat” it feels a lot like magic and it loses some of its power–especially when you put it in opposition to the magical stuff.
AD: Related to that, how much thought did you give to how magic should work and how it should be portrayed?
CJA: That was something I obsessed about for months. Originally my magic was really embarrassing and awful. I think that there’s two parts to it. One is where Patricia is discovering magic on her own. That had to feel to some extent mysterious and dreamlike. I felt like someone who is just figuring out magic on their own is not going to know any rules. If they do anything right, it’s going to be by accident. She stumbles into this mysterious power that she doesn’t understand and so the less understood the magic is in that part of the book, the more it felt real to me. I was very influenced by people like N.K. Jemisin, who has written about how magic shouldn’t be something where I plugged in this and did this and it always works. It should be finicky and weird and hard to control and mysterious and confusing and not at all user friendly. User friendly magic is terrible.
In the second half or two-thirds of the book where she’s living among other magicians, there should be rules and there should be an understanding of magic. There should be a history of magic that feels like something that actually happened and that feels like something that happened in our world. That was something that I really sweated bullets over and I had to figure out a how to make my magic as different from other things as possible without it being reactive. I had to make something that felt new and different to me. Also I had to explain for myself why didn’t these magicians do more to try to control the world if they have all this incredible power? If they are concerned about technology why didn’t they try to stop the industrial revolution when it was still possible to nip the industrial revolution in the bud? Stuff like that. Some of that stuff is explained in the book. Some of that stuff I just know for myself without putting it in the book, but either way there has to be an explanation otherwise it just feels flimsy. It took hours of just staring at a blank screen or a blank page before I went okay there are these two different schools of magic that were combined at one point in the Nineteenth Century. There’s this whole history that happened before the book that’s still playing out in some ways, but also certain things that used to be debated have been kind of settled. I felt like that made it a lot more real personally.
AD: The middle school section feels very different from the section where they're adults. Part of it is simply because they’re young and later as adults they have a context for understanding themselves and everything else.
CJA: That was something that I felt really strongly about. I knew that having that structure where you have 120 pages of them as kids and then boom they’re adults was going to be a structure that might not work as well for some people. It occurred to me once or twice that you could have them as adults and keep flashing back to them as kids, but I never really wanted to do that. I wanted you to feel immersed and trapped in the experience of being a kid and feeling like you don’t have any way out, you don’t have any options, and nobody understand you, and this is what your life is always going to be like. Then you’re an adult and everything’s different and you have all these options and you have all these choices and people do kind of understand you. Life is very different and you’ve managed to become a fully realized human, but it doesn’t mean that you’re life is suddenly perfect. I felt strongly that you had to go through that experience in a linear way.
AD: I actually thought the middle school section was more brutal and depressing than the near apocalypse. [laughs]
CJA: [laughs] I feel bad about that. I was just trying to be real, I guess. I really didn’t like middle school. [laughs]
AD: I loved the Parliament of Birds in the book. Where did that come from?
CJA: I wanted it to be a little bit dreamlike. That the that first chapter where we first meet Patricia and she saves an injured bird was originally much more like a fairy tale. I actually wrote it in fairy tale language and the feedback I got from a bunch of my beta readers was no, don’t do that. I stripped away all the fairy tale stuff in that first chapter, at least the language stopped being fairy tale, but I thought of it as a fairy tale. It was definitely it has a Grimm Brothers feeling to it where she finds this bird and she’s tested.
I love Chaucer and he has this poem about the parliament of birds where they’re debating and being silly and weird. That was the things that popped into my head as the thing that she has to go find and for whatever reason that stuck. There was a certain amount of dream logic in that first third of the novel when she’s dealing with magical stuff. Later in the book I ended up inserting some dream sequences, which I don’t usually like, but I felt like the only way I could get that dream logic in the adult sections is by having actual dream sequences.
AD: You mentioned that the first idea the book was a lot wackier, but the book does have a lot of humor. There are a lot of turns of phrase in the writing. Things like passive-aggressive lasagna. You have a lot of humorous touches throughout the book.
CJA: Thanks. I love passive aggressive lasagna. There was originally more about the passive aggressive lasagna. I felt like again, with the humor as with other stuff, I had to dial it back massively. Even in the ninth or tenth draft, the humor was overwhelming the characters. It was still taking you out of the book a little too much. It was drawing attention to itself in ways that were preventing you from being absorbed into the characters as much as I wanted. It was a really hard struggle to dial back the humor to the point where it felt organic to the characters and the story. Also to nail a consistent tone, because you don’t want a story that is heartfelt and emotional on one page and then a full blown cartoon. That can be fun but I settled on a tone that I called mildly whimsical or whimsical but dark. It has a lot of whimsy and strange, funny stuff, but never went fully broad.
AD: I like that, whimsy, which is a good way to describe it and it fits in with the more dreamlike elements.
CJA: The danger of whimsy is that it can be twee or too cutesy or too in love with its own quirky silliness, but I think that whimsy can also be dark and real in some sense. It can pack a punch. Not cartoony, not broad comedy, not one hundred per cent just serious, but touches of whimsy.
AD: As a final question, there’s this concern in the book that we’re almost too late, the near apocalypse is looming. While we’re busy writing about Supergirl–to name a show we’ve both written about recently–are we contributing to people not paying attention to what’s coming and what we should be focusing our time and energy on?
CJA: I think that escapist fiction has a valuable role in helping us cope with the world that we’re in. I also think that heroic narratives like Supergirl actually can help us to feel like we are not helpless. That we actually have the ability to do something about our problems. I think that there was that trend for a while of heroism is terrible, if you’re a hero you will do nothing but suffer, heroism is a curse, superpowers are a horrible disease that you suffer from. I think that heroism can be awesome and it can make the world a better place. I think that getting that message is not a bad thing to get at all. We talked about optimism before. People need to be encouraged to feel like they have power and that they can do something. Also, not all entertainment has to have an overt purpose of educating about the environment or raising your consciousness. I think that fun is good and entertainment is awesome and anything that helps people to cope with people alive is a good thing.
AD: We all need a little whimsy in our lives.
CJA: Exactly!
