On sale today: Charlie Jane Anders' debut science fiction and fantasy novel, All the Birds in the Sky

On sale today in hardcover and e-book. Excerpt here. Author website here. Public launch event (tonight!) here. Author tour info here.

My flap copy:

From an early age, Patricia Delfine and Lawrence Armstead had different--and sometimes opposite--ways of seeing the world. Patricia could talk to animals and even turn herself into a bird, while Lawrence built a supercomputer and a time machine (that only went forward two seconds). As they navigated the never-ending nightmare that is junior high school, they become wary allies, until an enigmatic guidance counselor with a hidden agenda intervened.

They didn't expect to see each other again. And yet ten years later, they're both adults, living in the hipster mecca San Francisco, and the planet is falling apart around them. Patricia is a graduate of Eltisley Maze, the secret academy for the magically gifted, and Laurence is an engineering genius who's trying to save the world. As Laurence and Patricia reconnect, they find themselves drawn into the opposite sides of a war between science and magic. And the fate of the world depends on them both. Probably.

Some notice:

"What a magnificent novel--a glorious synthesis of magic and technology, joy and sorrow, romance and wisdom. Unmissable."
--Lev Grossman

"In All the Birds in the Sky, Charlie Jane Anders darts and soars, with dazzling aplomb, among the hypotheticals of science fiction, the counterfactuals of fantasy, and the bittersweet mundanities of contemporary American life, throwing lightning bolts of literary style that shimmer with enchantment or electrons. She tackles profound, complicated questions, vast and insignificant as the fate of the planet, tiny and crucial as the vagaries of friendship, rocketing the reader through a pocket-sized epic of identity whose sharply-drawn protagonists come to feel like the reader's best friends. The very short list of novels that dare to traffic as freely in the uncanny and wondrous as in big ideas, and to create an entire, consistent, myth-ridden alternate world that is still unmistakably our own, all while breaking the reader's heart into the bargain--I think of masterpieces like The Lathe of Heaven; Cloud Atlas; Little, Big--has just been extended by one."
--Michael Chabon

"Charlie Jane Anders' brilliant, cross-genre novel All the Birds in the Sky has the hallmarks of an instant classic. It's a beautifully written, funny, tremendously moving tale that explodes the boundaries between science fiction and fantasy, YA and 'mainstream' fiction."
--Elizabeth Hand, Los Angeles Times

"Charlie Jane Anders has entwined strands of science and fantasy, both as genres and as ways of experiencing life, into a luminous novel that reveals the exhilarating necessity of each."
--John Hodgman

"Two crazy kids, one gifted in science, the other in magic, meet as children, part and meet again over many years. Will they find love? Will they save the world? Or will they destroy it and everyone in it? Read Anders lively, wacky, sexy, scary, weird and wonderful book to find the answers."
--Karen Joy Fowler

"The book is full of quirkiness and playful detail--it's not hard to imagine Wes Anderson adapting it, if he ever turned toward science fiction--but there's an overwhelming depth and poignancy to its virtuoso ending, which tugs all of its rich cultural symbolism into a heart-wrenching whole."
--NPR