Review: The City in the Middle of the Night

The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I read this book as part of voting for the Hugo Awards this year. This book was in sixth place on my ballot; two below "No Award". A 3-star review reflects my experience with this book. Charlie's past success is the only reason this book didn't go into the DNF pile. I had hoped that the ending would redeem the work and justify the time invested. Nope.

Sophie and Bianca are college students studying to be something influential in the future. They live in a city that tightly controls all facets of society. So they are lucky to have their privileged positions. Bianca steals some money for food that she doesn't really need. The police randomly detain them. Sophie thinks she is saving Bianca by taking the money which the police soon discover. Sophie is taken outside of the city and forced her to climb a hill (more like a small mountain) into the dark side of the planet.

The planet is tidally locked with the sun! One side of the planet always faces the sun and the other side exists in perpetual darkness. The hot side is hot. The cold side is very cold.

The humans arrived on this planet via a generation ship from Earth. As the story unfolds, we learn there is a sentient, intelligent species that is native to the planet. The humans are invaders.

This book continues to cause me so many problems. Charlie Jane Anders is a wonderfully gifted author. Charlie's writing is thought-provoking in unusual ways.

This book would have been above No Award if it didn't have so many plot holes. Where to start.

The planet is tidally locked. The hot side is hot enough to cause wood to auto-ignite

Humanity is largely concentrated in two cities/regions. There is a narrow band of the planet that is suitable for human habitation that exists about the terminator between "day" and "night". Assuming that this planet is reasonably Earth-like (i.e. similar size, mass, etc.) that stationary terminator is bound to be roughly 35 to 40 miles wide. The moving terminator on Earth is roughly 37 miles wide.

When the police were forcing Sophie over that hill, they were forcing her into an area of an eternal and bitterly cold night. During her venture into this frigid zone, she meets one of the planet's natives and communicates with them. Eventually, the native gets her back to the city where she slips inside the wall and hides.

She reconnects with Bianca. Then end up traveling to the other city and learn about a different, far less regimented lifestyle.

The comparison between the two cities reads to me as comparing your average socialist state (complete with currency manipulations and other tricks) and near-total anarchy. That general theme was handled better in Clockwork Angels by Kevin J. Anderson and Neil Peart several years ago.

Eventually, the two join with some activists in the anarchist city and they go back to the authoritarian city to take over and "change things". Just what every young college student is determined to do. Sophie gets separated from the group during the trip home and ends up going to the native city that is under the icy nighttime surface. She learns about how humans have been unknowingly screwing with the native environment. She learns a bit more about the humans that first settled on the planet. The natives end up doing surgery on Sophie to change her into something that is not human and not wholly native.

As a past Hugo winner, Charlie Jane Anders has a record of superior writing performance. Based on that past work, I felt that I should read this book in full to give it (and Charlie) the fullest opportunity. The characters were engaging. There were several themes that were quite thought-provoking.

But there were so many questions.

Why did the humans elect to come to this planet? They had built a generation ship so they could have elected for another, more hospitable planet.

Within the narrative of the story, different cities...and thus different ethnicities...contribute different parts to the design of the generation ship. As a result, one group of citizens is able to use their knowledge/resources to gain power over the rest of the ship. A war breaks out. While the intergroup dynamics are understandable, the origin for those dynamics, the division of labor/design based on region/ethnicity, doesn't make much sense.

Given the extreme temperature of the side of the planet facing the sun (the autoignition temperature of wood is roughly 700°F), I find it difficult to believe that they had landing craft capable of sustaining life from the generation ship down to the surface of the planet. That would be comparable to temperatures on either Mercury or Venus. The extreme temperature differential should cause nearly non-stop storms raging across the terminator zone.

The humans of this world are inhuman. It is suggested that all of the resources that one could imagine are located on or under the daytime side of the planet. Yet the humans have done nothing to pursue those resources in an attempt to build a civilization. They just exist on the scavaged remains of the generation ship until their ability to get back to the generation ship ends. This inaction by humanity is inhuman.

Anyone with some basic familiarity with thermodynamics will know that having such a high and constant temperature differential creates a source of nearly limitless, cheap power. Yet the humans do nothing to exploit that potential. Crops are raised on contraptions that slowly rotate like giant Ferris wheels so that the crops can all get sun and shade. Humans physically power that motion.

The native city/culture reads like a prototypical utopian socialist state. While the other city read as the predictable result of a human socialist state, the native city is an echo of the tired cliche that "real socialism hasn't been tried". People talk. Things happen. There are puppet shows in theaters. Everyone communicates with everyone else. Things just get done based on quasi-mystical consensus. Individualism is suppressed.

There is even some sort of Ancestor ghost-god that everyone consults for guidance. It is suggested that the ghost-god exists somewhere between a mass illusion, to collective memory, to actual existence. The only progress that occurs is when a couple of natives isolate themselves from the larger group to develop new devices. This is the culture that strips Sophie of her humanity so that she can join their collective.

The close of the book is a dream sequence where the altered Sophie takes some sort of astral projection dream trip out into space to recall the time when humans first arrived. It is stated that this vision doesn't reflect any actual lived experience of the natives. I found it to be a cheap gimmick.

Throughout the book, there are various suggestions that some of our modern problems are in play. Greed, sexism, racism, and a host of other intersectional causes appear and then quickly disappear from consideration. There never is a single flaw nor a single solution beyond the questioning of basic human existence. This was particularly disappointing as Charlie has done a fantastic job in the past of illustrating multiple flaws/issues in a way that lends clarity to the human condition.

Between the troublesome plot points and the general thematic issues, I simply did not find this to be a compelling work worthy of higher recognition. This book was the greatest disappointment out of six nominees. I thought there might be some discussion of challenges associated with space travel, or on developing new worlds, or general engineering obstacles. All of that ended up being the potted plants in a tableau designed to question the value of human existence.

Reading this book put me in the mind of a quote by author Jim Butcher: "Never preach harder than you can entertain." When the sub-text supersedes the text, an author has shifted from story-telling to preaching. Butcher's aphorism applies.

[A brief coda. I was so enthused by Charlie's prior Hugo winning book that I was genuinely looking forward to reading this year's nominated work. This was like having eaten fine food at a Michelin starred restaurant and being served a Big Mac and fries on a subsequent visit. I originally had this book one slot higher on my ballot until I got done writing this lengthy post.]

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My reviews of all of the 2020 Hugo finalists for best novel are here.