Review of The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders

Science fiction is as much setting as it is genre. The City in the Middle of the Night is a firm example of this. Charlie Jane Anders could have set this story somewhere on Earth, or written it up as a weird literary fiction fever dream. Instead, she set it in the far future, on a tidally locked world where humans eke out an existence in two cities of radically different politics. One of the blurbs on this book hails Anders as a modern-day Le Guin, and while I find that a somewhat hyperbolic statement, I also understand the comparison. This book certainly has echoes of The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed in terms of its setting and its political plot. I would also liken it somewhat to Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy in terms of what goes on with the aliens in this novel. However, I also think this is very much its own story.

Sophie is a student at a university in Xiosphant, an authoritarian settlement that strictly regulates a curfew around when people should wake and sleep. She crushes on her roommate, Bianca, who is far more affluent and connected than she is. When Sophie takes the fall for something Bianca did, she’s exiled from the city. Exile into the inhospitable frozen night beyond is basically a death sentence. However, Sophie encounters an alien and finds a way to communicate. When she returns to Xiosphant, she eventually falls in with a group of people, undertakes a dangerous journey, and finds herself at the spear tip of a revolution.

To me, this book is all about Sophie and Bianca’s tragic romance (if you can even really call it that). “This is a disaster” is telegraphed all over their relationship from the first page, and I love it. Girl, she isn’t good for you!! But you keep following her anyway because you can’t stop, and though as an aromantic person I don’t quite get it, I still get it. I’ve seen Bianca catch a lot of criticism from reviewers for being unlikeable, and I understand where that charge comes from, but I respectfully submit that’s missing the point: Bianca is who she is because of her upbringing, and Sophie isn’t being dense by not realizing that she and Bianca aren’t quite fated to be together—Sophie just doesn’t know any better. The tension between Sophie and Bianca as the latter fails (or refuses) to accept the sapience of the Gelet is delicious, and the evolution of their relationship as each is radicalized in their own way is equally exciting. I’m sure there are far more appropriate historical comparisons, but Lenin and Trotsky are the only ones who come to mind at the moment, so I will roll with that—if you love watching passionate idealists make friends with terrific pragmatists and see them fall out, this is for you.

There’s also a second protagonist in the form of Mouth, a smuggler who is the last surviving member of a small nomadic group. Mouth’s story ends up intersecting with Sophie and Bianca’s in a spiral of sorts. Meanwhile, she is obsessed with reclaiming what little of her culture remains—to an almost self-destructive degree. While I enjoyed Mouth as a character, I’m not sure I enjoyed her story as much. I feel like Anders is trying to explore the extent to which someone should remember lost family and culture versus try to reclaim and restore it, but I just don’t think she spends the pages necessary to really do this story justice.

The same is true for the wider worldbuilding that gradually unspools as we learn more about humans’ journey to this planet. It’s allegorical at best, these flimsy constructs of cities, but that is where genre runs into setting: don’t think too hard about it.

What might require a little more thought is Sophie’s relationship with the Gelet. This is truly the most alien, most science-fictional aspect of the story. There’s a tiny squick/body horror to it, but for the most part I think it’s a fairly standard use of tropes around how humans will inevitably need to adapt—in both body and mind—to whatever planets we spread to beyond Earth. Sophie’s gradual acceptance and even embrace of this ideology positions her in stark contrast to basically everyone else in the story, who for one reason or another is deeply invested in preserving the status quo. But the deepest rumblings within the machinery of the plot suggest that’s a fool’s errand at best—between climate shifts and resource depletion, Anders suggests that no civilization can be content with a steady state.

The City in the Middle of the Night is good. I don’t know if it’s great. I didn’t have as much fun with it as I have Anders’s YA fare, which is why I’m only giving it three stars. But I think if you are in the mood for a slightly more cerebral approach to science fiction—yes, something along the lines of Butler or Le Guin—then this is a really appropriate choice.