The Liver Birds "Man is the dog, and woman is the bone. He eats the best of you, and buries the rest of you, and when his dish is empty—he'll dig you up again." This would be the last series with Beryl; as Polly James explained: "The reason I left the programme in the end was that I felt I was in danger of caricaturing what was already a pretty outrageous character." Producer Sydney Lotterby had to find a new leading actress to keep the series going after Polly James' departure. In 1971 he'd replaced Pauline Collins with Nerys Hughes, and Hughes herself
All the Birds in the Sky "All the Birds in the Sky" a "relationship story". Anders cited Cory Doctorow's "Little Brother" (2008) and Jo Walton's "Among Others" (2011) as inspiration for the Patricia and Laurence coming of age sections of the novel. In a review in "SF Signal", science fiction critic James Wallace Harris described "All the Birds in the Sky" as "three weddings: a marriage of science fiction and fantasy, ... YA and adult, and ... genre and literary." He said Anders manages this "with a light touch, producing a novel that is a joy to read, yet is as deep as you're willing to