The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders
Would you render everything to see the world change?
In January, a colonized planet split in two by perennially freezing darkness on one side and brilliant, never-ending brightness on the other, humanity desperately clings to life. The last remaining centres of civilisation are two ancient towns situated in the sparse temperate zone, yet life there is just as deadly as that in the surrounding hostile wastelands.
After taking part in a failed revolt, Sophie, a teenage student from the wrong side of Xiosphant city, is sent into the shadows. However, she manages to stay alive thanks to a mystic rescuer from underneath the ice.
Sophie and her motley crew of exiles are facing the greatest struggle of their lives, but they are running out of time because they are carrying a painful and dangerous secret.
The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders
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Young Sophie attends college revolution meetings because she cares deeply for her roommate Bianca, not because she agrees with the chants. She uncontrollably defends Bianca from the city’s demi-fascist cops one day. The police kick Sophie out of the city and into the tundra of the monster-infested planet January without even giving her a chance to defend herself. There, she meets a monster. Imagine her surprise as the creature reaches out to her.
Charlie In her second book, Jane Anders builds a complex structure just to destroy it again using well-known science fiction materials, including Lego blocks. Interplanetary colonization and carefully balanced ecosystems, which genre readers are familiar with, serve as launching pads for Anders’ assertions on what makes people human. Because, as you may already be aware, Anders intends to modify that definition.
The planet January is tidally locked, which means that one side is always facing the sun and is constantly bathed in intense sunshine, while the other side is permanently enveloped in darkness. The twilight is a constrictive equatorial area where humans can survive. The most significant concept of this work, the polarity between opposites, is embodied by this perpetual equipoise. Everyone and everything on January’s globe exists at extremes; people have lost the ability to strike a balance.
Throughout the book, this unbalance is consistently apparent. The beginning of Sophie’s story takes place in Xiosphant, a city that controls everything to deal with its constant lack of light. Everybody in the city wakes up, eats, and goes to bed at the same hour. Sophie resists their predetermined schedule for marriage and procreation. Sophie and Bianca, exiled from Xiosphant, move to Argelo, the only other city in January, a sybaritic sanctuary of nonstop parties and uncontrolled self-indulgence.
Between Argelo’s laissez-faire chaos and Xiosphant’s strict discipline, Sophie finds the Gelet, a native species of the planet, living quietly in the midnight ice. Humans consume the crops that Gelet cultivate in volcanic fissures as well as the meat that they hunt for. The Gelet are the sole system preventing planet January from degenerating into environmental entropy, and Sophie is the first person to recognize this. Sophie also learns that the Gelet are intelligent and that their crops aren’t just plants…
Anders describes the conflict that all humans face: we must adjust to our surroundings, whether they be technological or natural, but we are also averse to change, choosing the security of the familiar even when that familiarity is killing us. The struggle between change and familiarity is resolved and a new one is set in motion as the book comes to a close. Anders seems to be saying that this duality is common. Humans must just adapt, or they will perish trying. There doesn’t appear to be a simple middle ground for Anders.
