Monday, March 18, 2019

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders




The City in the Middle of the Night has some of the highest expectations to live up to possible for a SF/F book that's not part of a continuing series.  For those who don't know, Charlie Jane Anders (its author) is a pretty big name in the genre - founder of the blog, io9, writer of quite a lot of (and oft award-winning) short fiction - whose last book, All the Birds in the Sky, won the Nebula Award and came in 2nd by a tiny margin for the Hugo in 2017 - and deservedly so.  And with this book being compared by reviewers to Ursula K Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness* - with the book's hardcover including the blurb "This Generation's Le Guin" - the book has a ton to live up to.

*I didn't review it on here at the time, but I only read LHoD last year, and it really wasn't my thing.  So take that for what it's worth.*

Does The City in the Middle of the Night live up to said expectations?  Unsurprisingly the answer is "not, really" although the Le Guin influence is clear (as to me, is another clear influence, Octavia Butler's Lilith's Brood).  But even separated away from those expectations, I didn't quite find this book as good as I'd hoped, with the book having a number of interesting ideas but not fully executing on many of them, and having some pacing problems that made it drag especially in the middle.  It's certainly an interesting book, I just don't think it's particularly good at how it explores its ideas - and these ideas are certainly not new, even if this particular combination is more unique.


-----------------------------------------------Plot Summary-----------------------------------------------------
Sophie is a young woman from the poor outskirts of Xiosphant, one of two human cities in the dusk-zone of a planet which is otherwise divided in two - between a side bathed in eternal light and a side bathed in eternal darkness.  Xiosphant is a city of rigidity - with everyone's lives and days scheduled to the minute, a firm contrast from its counterpart city Argelo, where absolute freedom reigns.  Having made her way to the Gymnasium (essentially, a university) in order to avoid a destiny she does not want, Sophie feels out of place, with her only comfort being her roommate Bianca, who comes from Xiosphant's elite but wishes she could change things.

But when Bianca is about to get in trouble for petty theft, Sophie takes the blame, afraid of the consequences to the one she's come to secretly love.  As a poor outsider, the police do the unthinkable, they take Sophie to the Dark and leave her there to die.  But instead, Sophie finds the original alien inhabitants of the planet - long thought non-sentient and derided as "crocodiles" - and is given a vision by them of a magnificent city that exists somehow in the middle of the Dark zones of the planet.

And when Sophie returns to Xiophant, she finds that everything has seemingly changed underneath the surface, with Bianca becoming a fierce revolutionary in her name, and the two of them both having their fates intertwined with a pair of smugglers - named Mouth and Alyssa - who are struggling to find a place in this present world and to deal with their own pasts.  As Sophie attempts to try and regain what she once had with Bianca, in both Xiophant and then later in the crazy city of Argelo, she can't help but feel called back to the aliens who once saved her, and to the City that she knows exists....in the middle of the night.
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The above plot summary is inadequate, just like the plot summary in the book jacket or on Amazon, but it's the best one can do without getting too damn wordy.  For example, about 40% of the story is told from the perspective of Mouth, and Mouth and Alyssa's relationship makes a significant part of this book, with it being a clear parallel to the relationship between Sophie and Bianca.  But it's kind of hard to explain the relationship in the plot summary.

There are essentially three intertwined plots that make up this book: the relationship between Sophie and Blanca, the relationship between Alyssa and Mouth, and the relationship of the Sophie to the aliens - the Gelet.  The first two relationships are essentially in parallel but reversed, so our main characters Sophie and Mouth serve as parallels not to each other but to the opposite members of their relationships (Alyssa is Sophie's equivalent, Mouth is Bianca's).

Sophie and Bianca's relationship is the primary focus and is incredibly strong from Sophie's point of view - you can see how she fell in love with the girl that Bianca was and why she has a hard time dealing with Bianca's changes, and you can see how Bianca really exemplifies all the worst attributes of a privileged member of society who thinks she knows how to change things and thinks she really wants to without ever being willing to think of the others involved in her actions.  Meanwhile, you can see how Sophie fell in love with Bianca and why she finds it so hard to deal with the changes that have overcome her.

Mouth and Alyssa's relationship is secondary and isn't quite as strong - with in this case Mouth being our main character but serving in Bianca's role as the character who refuses to accept what she has in the present in the search of something more, while Alyssa wants to find some place to settle down, some role that the two of them can be happy in - a task Alyssa tries to achieve in an awful lot of ways.  It's a bit more of a thematic mess honestly, as while we get to see Sophie and Bianca's friendship from the beginning, so we understand why they were drawn together, we don't get to see that with Mouth and Alyssa.

And then there's the relationship between Sophie and the Gelet, which invokes for me the feelings of Octavia Butler's "Lilith's Brood" trilogy (Dawn, Adulthood Rites, Imago).  Like the aliens of that trilogy (the Oankali), the Gelet communicate via their strange tentacles - in this case via the transmission of memories and visions.  Through it all, Sophie sees a different path towards change than that offered by Bianca, and it's a really interesting path - one dealt with similarly by other books, sure, but interesting nonetheless.  Still, this whole concept is explored relatively late in the story, and doesn't feel like it's given enough time to develop.

The book's biggest problem is the pacing is incredibly slow, with the plot dragging quite a bit at times.  The book is split into seven parts, the at least one of which (the fifth - which is only 16 pages mind you) seems incredibly superfluous - the book could've easily gone from the prior part (#4) to the part after (#6) without issue, and even seemed heading that direction till a last minute swerve for no reason.  Even ignoring the superfluous nature of an entire part, the story drags at times, with the reader seeing where the plot is going at times a bit before it actually goes there, making it feel like you're reading the approach to an in-universe trainwreck.

And with the book's pacing, it really doesn't have enough time for all of its ideas.  Take the book's two human cities for example - both are extreme opposites and show their own forms of dystopia, but the book never really takes the time to do anything interesting with these concepts, and simply shows that they are bad (and less so with Xiosphant than Argelo).  Similarly, the ideas of the Gelet's transformations as a way forward is introduced really late, and while it works, and the book interestingly doesn't present it as a perfect solution, it feels shortchanged from all the development it could've gotten, in favor of much more time given to the Sophie-Bianca relationship, which is almost overdone and too predictable.

I suspect The City in the Middle of the Night will be nominated for a bunch of awards next year, and it's certainly interesting, as I try to denote above.  But it's also kind of a mess of pacing, and I wasn't particularly enthused with the full package as a result.  So it won't make my lists, to my regret.
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