2017/28: All the Birds in the Sky -- Charlie Jane Anders

...she felt like her whole history was taking on a whole new focus, the landscape of her past rearranging so that the stuff with Laurence became major geographical features and some other, lonelier, events shrank proportionately. Historical revisionism was like a sugar rush, flooding her head.

Patricia Delfine discovers that she's a witch at the age of six: however, she loses her magical abilities when her parents lock her in her bedroom, and spends the rest of her childhood trying hard to get birds to talk to her again. She's the target of the school bullies -- as is Laurence (never Larry), a protogeek who creates a 2-second time machine and truants from school to watch a rocket launch.

They become friends, despite their very different varieties of geekness -- Patricia loves nature because it's 'not like people', Laurence loves science because it promises control -- and save one another's lives: and then don't meet again for ten years.

Patricia has become part of a group of magic-users who are working to combat various ecological and natural disasters: Laurence is working for maverick tech investor and engineering genius Milton Dirth, whose Ten Percent Project aims to get 10% of the population off-planet in the next few years. Patricia's time at a magical school (strongly reminiscent of Lev Grossman's Brakebills) has taught her to use her powers wisely, for the good of others, and not to overreach (beware Aggrandizement!). Laurence has helped to develop what is essentially a doomsday machine, which might destroy the Earth (but hey, the odds are good). They both want to change the world, but have very different approaches: 'fantasy' and 'science fiction' might be appropriate labels for those approaches.

But there is a third character, an AI which they have effectively, though unwittingly, co-parented: and that third character may be able to align Patricia's and Laurence's world views ...

This novel is immense fun, passionate and funny and brimming with ideas. (I liked the Nameless Order of Assassins; Lars Saarinian's educational models, which are based on pigs in the slaughterhouse; the distinction between, and synthesis of, Trickster and Healer magic ...) The San Francisco milieu in which the two protagonists reconnect has a horrid verisimilitude: hipsters singing madrigals, graduates suffering imposter syndrome, omnipresent personal technology (which one character describes as '[making] serendipity happen more often' ...

Though occasionally All the Birds in the Sky feels as though it's falling over itself in its rush to the denouement, it's a cracking read. I'm looking forward to more from Anders.