Charlie Jane Anders’s Nebula award-winning debut All The Birds in the Sky (2016) was a quirky if ramshackle combination of futuristic science and magic that held together largely through the charm of Anders’s voice. Her follow-up is a more carefully structured work: classic SF in the mode of Ursula K Le Guin or Octavia Butler. The planet January is tidally locked to its star, one side scorched by constant sunlight and the other a frozen wilderness of endless night, with human settlement confined to the narrow twilight zone between the two. Life is hard, sustained by ancient technologies that are starting to fail, the darkness behind the cities populated by terrifying monsters.
The story begins when student Sophie takes the fall for a theft by her roommate, the more confident and beautiful Bianca. Punishment is extreme: Sophie is thrown to the night-side to die. She survives by connecting with the alien “crocodiles”, telepathic creatures whose compassionate intelligence belies their giant pincers and tentacled hideousness.
The main narrative is about the possibility of rapprochement between humans and aliens. Humans loathe the alien Gelets, and to the Gelets we are “piles of hot meat, giving off fear chemicals”. It’s well done if hardly original – decades ago Star Trek’s Captain Picard met aliens who saw human beings as “ugly bags of mostly water”.
This is a long novel, and it’s not in a hurry to get where it’s going. Anders’s plotting isn’t thin, exactly; it’s just that storyline isn’t what she finds most interesting. Instead she draws the reader into the socio-political detail of her imagined world: “Circadianism”, the governing system of Sophie’s home city, creating artificial ‘Timefulness’ to regulate its citizenry; or the Argelan language, which lacks tenses, qualifiers or distinctions, but has “a million different terms for relationships: lovers, parent/child, teacher/student, friend”.
This is a millennial’s novel, featuring young people trying to make their way through an uncaring, corrupt and intermittently violent world. If this middle-aged reviewer found it sometimes hard to like the dramatis personae, that doubtless says more about the gap between real-world generations than about the novel. Though sometimes judgmental and self-righteous, Anders’s characters are also emotionally sophisticated and passionate, and this is heartfelt and absorbing fiction.
• The City in the Middle of the Night is published by Titan (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
