![]() ![]() ![]() Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.Las Vegas, Myrtle Beach, Chicago, Orlando, San Diego, New York City, San Francisco, Miami Beach, Los Angeles, Washington, DC, New Orleans, Atlantic City, Boston, San Antonio, Atlanta, Virginia Beach, Denver, Ocean City, Fort Lauderdale, Nashville, Destin, Austin, Panama City Beach, Reno, Honolulu, Houston, Phoenix, Pigeon Forge, Brooklyn, Daytona Beach, Sacramento, Colorado Springs, Charleston, Savannah, Charlotte, Santa Cruz, Santa Barbara, Palm Springs, St. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. ![]() The City in the Middle of the Night is published by Titan (£14.99). Though sometimes judgmental and self-righteous, Anders’s characters are also emotionally sophisticated and passionate, and this is heartfelt and absorbing fiction. 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. This is a millennial’s novel, featuring young people trying to make their way through an uncaring, corrupt and intermittently violent world. 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”. ![]() Anders’s plotting isn’t thin, exactly it’s just that storyline isn’t what she finds most interesting. This is a long novel, and it’s not in a hurry to get where it’s going. 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”. Humans loathe the alien Gelets, and to the Gelets we are “piles of hot meat, giving off fear chemicals”. The main narrative is about the possibility of rapprochement between humans and aliens. She survives by connecting with the alien “crocodiles”, telepathic creatures whose compassionate intelligence belies their giant pincers and tentacled hideousness. Punishment is extreme: Sophie is thrown to the night-side to die. The story begins when student Sophie takes the fall for a theft by her roommate, the more confident and beautiful Bianca. Life is hard, sustained by ancient technologies that are starting to fail, the darkness behind the cities populated by terrifying monsters. 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. Her follow-up is a more carefully structured work: classic SF in the mode of Ursula K Le Guin or Octavia Butler. C harlie 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. ![]()
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