Reviews and Comments

A quick read. I feel like trying to employ techniques to gauge whether someone is lying to you to be exhausting if you go through life using them all the time. Perhaps it's ultimately more useful to know of them in case anyone else who's read this book is trying to manipulate you.

More generally, the book is useful as a way of understanding you and how other people think. Part II is about how self-esteem really affects the way people behave, so understanding whether or not people like themselves will shed a light on any interaction. More importantly, for me, as I'm also going through life grappling with self-esteem issues, it helps to know how resolving them will also change my own interactions with others.

A couple of other notes: the writer uncritically leans on Meyers-Briggs and Maslow's hierarchy of needs here, whose validity have been called into question by others elsewhere. While it doesn't necessarily invalidate the entire book, it does remind us that this is one view of how humans work -- possibly narrowed by American or Western cultural norms -- and not necessarily a magical how-to guide reflecting a universal truth. As Lieberman himself disclaims early on, his research can only give you a statistical advantage, not a crystal ball. Context is everything. And unfortunately, in the real world, one does not have the privilege of running the same interaction hundreds of times to test the statistical edge.

This book was recommended to me, soon after I'd finished Robin Sloan's Sourdough, and then declared that modern-day magical realism was exactly the genre that meant the most to me, particularly the stories in which California-based millennials struggled to find humanity and meaning in a tech-centric world. It's a kind of science fiction where all the technobabble is familiar and real, but a dose of mysticism is needed to keep Silicon Valley palatable. Venture capitalists already believe in too many fairy tales.

All The Birds In the Sky is decidedly more magical than realism, and because it's more about the duality of magic and science, both worlds are represented more or less equally. The refreshing take here isn't that it's magic versus science, at odds with each other, forever warring for dominance and yet must be maintained in some kind of cosmic balance. Or even the Harry Potter version, where magicians exist in a fundamentally separatist society. Here the wizards just exist in the world in their own way, and the factions aren't sparring so much as they don't give a shit about each other, in much the way subcultures do when they have nothing in common.

Another fantastic element of the storytelling is the way Anders refuses to take her own writing seriously. Or, to put it another way, she is serious about not putting on the airs of someone writing genre fiction by pretending to do it in the voice of Tolkien or some other, more established writer from many decades ago. Anders writes the way you or I would be telling someone a story, today, which makes this book more a product of now, and not someone pretending to know what now sounds like, or someone cramming now into the mold of some other era. It's entirely possible that this is normal and I don't read enough stuff, but I felt like I don't see this often.

Some writers may tend to fall into a trap where the mystical elements are all about some kind of profound ancient wisdom guarded by witches and revealed for the benefit of the main characters' growth, but not Anders. Again, she keeps it simple, and therefore more real. People are just people trying to make it in life, whether they have magical powers or superhuman technical chops. Birds are just birds. In the first chapter, birds propose The Endless Question to Patricia, who has just learned she can understand and speak to animals and was led to the Parliament of Birds to be examined. She never finds an answer until the very end. This is going to be a spoiler, but it turns out there's nothing profound about the question, the answer, or even the entire process; it turns out the Parliament of Birds is just a government of birds who adhered to bylaws for no good reason other than that is the point of bylaws.

(Also there is more to the story than birds. Despite the title.)

The serious point that Anders does point to, gently at first, and then clearly toward the end of the book, is that the universe has a diversity of viewpoints and perspectives and as a result, even concepts that seem universal, like ethics, cannot be derived from first principles. If animals can speak and think, then even lofty, well-meaning goals about "saving humanity" seems treacherously narrow-minded. (Of course, the moral of the story is not that animals are people too, but whether individuals are willing to consider perspectives that they could not possibly have a personal frame of reference for.) In the end, Laurence, the white, male Silicon Valley wunderkind who represents a very particular Valley-inspired viewpoint on ethics, loses his ability to speak forever. It's a reminder that it's time for those who claim to speak for all of us, shut up and start to listen.