The City in the Middle of the Night in Beyond Reality

Sep 07, 2020 Tomislav rated it really liked it

Shelves: science-fiction, fantasy

Charlie Jane Ander’s prior fantasy novel All the Birds in the Sky won the 2017 Nebula, and this new novel is a move in a different subgenre direction. A successful direction, as it won first place 2020 Locus Award for SF. For my part, I had not read CJA before.

A planetary romance, The City in the Middle of the Night is set on a tidally locked planet with an inhabitable strip around its horizon – dark in one direction, and intensely bright in the other. A few centuries ago, the ancestors of its h Charlie Jane Ander’s prior fantasy novel All the Birds in the Sky won the 2017 Nebula, and this new novel is a move in a different subgenre direction. A successful direction, as it won first place 2020 Locus Award for SF. For my part, I had not read CJA before.

A planetary romance, The City in the Middle of the Night is set on a tidally locked planet with an inhabitable strip around its horizon – dark in one direction, and intensely bright in the other. A few centuries ago, the ancestors of its human inhabitants arrived in a generation ship, put together by a smattering of surviving underground city-states on Earth. They now live mostly in two treacherously separated cities, having lost all contact with the Mothership, and in a condition of slowly declining technology and critical resources.

Several cover blurbs compare this to the works of Ursula LeGuin, and there are similarities. In the beginning, I was reminded of The Word for World is Forest, with human settlers not recognizing or respecting the native population. But later, the two cities of divergent culture (Xiosphant is a police state with high social conformity, and Argela is a free-for-all run by crime families) reminded me of The Dispossessed. Like LeGuin, there is a sprinkling of cultural mythology told along the way. Yet, I did not find the anthropological realism of those LeGuin works here, nor plausible scientific speculation. I once had a discussion with someone who believed that the difference between science fiction and fantasy was simply the tropes in which the same sort of story was told, and The City in the Middle of the Night bears that out. But I think the difference ought to be more than that. The biological implausibility and telepathy of the Gelet seems more like magical thinking for the sake of the plot. This is science fantasy, while LeGuin’s SF is social science fiction.

That said, I found the complex characters to be evolving and engaging in a way I enjoyed. Their relationships were of foremost concern. The texture of the two cities and several outside groups was well developed – for example, the Illyrian Parlour, with its trappings of Old Zagreb, triggered associations for me that may be more than the author intended, but I think I could love that place even if it weren’t Zagreb. This is a substantial story, but with a somewhat miraculous ending. ...more

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