The Ghost Birds by Karen Russell, 2021
The magic trick:
Highly intelligent world-building
“The Ghost Birds” creates a dystopian near-future where birds are only memories and what used to be Eugene, Oregon, is reduced to a set of crumbling buildings.
Having published in 2021, it’s easy to forever connect with it COVID. And certainly the pandemic likely made it easier to make connections to the then-present world. It’s a very imaginative and detailed story world here, though. It seems stupid to credit an author’s intelligence, as I’m one who would argue that anyone who can write an even-semi-coherent short story is a highly, highly intelligent person. But this story is especially smart. The world-building here requires a lot of knowledge – or research – about a lot of different things.
And that’s quite a trick on Russell’s part.
The selection:
By the time I discovered the Paranormal Birding Society, extinct bird species outnumbered living ones. I should have been collecting feathers in 2040, not Orioles baseball cards and rotary telephones. I never suspected that every bird would disappear in my lifetime. Wavelengths of color and song. Ice pigeons. Yellow-eyed penguins. Great blue herons. Purple gallinules. Red-throated sunbirds. Somali ostriches. Rock doves. Day-old chicks, accumulating damage with each smoky breath. There was a last nestling of every species. On the nightly news, and outside our sealed windows, we watched birds dying from the smoke waves and the fast-moving plagues, from habitat destruction and hunger, from triple-digit temperatures and neurotoxic metals powdering the air. When I was Starling’s age, I did not understand, somehow—even as I lifted the greening copper of a twentieth-century telephone to my ear—that our time would end as well.
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