Midnight's Stepchildren

Charlie Jane Anders, The City in the Middle of the Night

Young Sophie attends college revolutionary meetings, not because she believes the slogans, but because she loves her roommate Bianca. One day, she impulsively protects Bianca from the city’s demi-fascist police. Without even a trial, the police eject Sophie from the city, onto the planet January’s monster-haunted tundra, where, sure enough, she meets a monster. Imagine her shock when the monster tries to befriend her

Charlie Jane Anders’ second novel uses familiar science fiction elements like Lego bricks, building a complex edifice simply so she can tear it down again. Concepts which genre readers have grown comfy with, like interplanetary colonization and narrowly balanced ecosystems (the symbolism is deliberate and aggressive), become staging grounds for Anders’ statements about what makes humans human. Because you know, Anders plans to change that definition, as SF writers do.

Planet January is tidally locked, meaning one side always faces the sun, blanketed in permanent, blazing-hot sunlight, while the opposite side remains shrouded in darkness. The zone of human habitability lives in “the twilight,” a narrow equatorial band. This eternal equipoise embodies the most important theme of this book, the polarity between opposites. Everybody and everything exists in complete extremes; humans on planet January have forgotten how to find balance.

This lack of balance comes across repeatedly throughout the novel. Sophie’s story begins in Xiosphant, a city which handles its permanent half-lit state by regimenting everything. The entire city works, eats, and sleeps at exactly the same time… and they also marry and breed on a schedule which Sophie rejects. Exiled from Xiosphant, Sophie and Bianca relocate to January’s only other city, Argelo, a sybaritic haven of constant parties and lawless self-indulgence.

Caught between Xiosphant’s absolute order, and Argelo’s laissez-faire chaos, Sophie discovers the Gelet, the planet’s native species, living peacefully in the midnight ice. Humans hunt the Gelet for meat, and eat the crops Gelet plant in volcanic fissures. Sophie becomes the first human to realize the Gelet are intelligent, and their crops aren’t just plants, they’re the only system keeping planet January from collapsing into environmental entropy.

Charlie Jane Anders

Anders’ narrative voice switches between Sophie and “Mouth,” which preserves the polar opposites theme. Sophie is an educated, idealistic young adult; Mouth is rough-hewn and nomadic. She also never underwent her tribe’s adulthood rites, trapping her in permanent childhood even as she grows cynical and nihilistic; “Mouth” was a placeholder name until she got her grown-up name. But Sophie and Mouth’s worlds become increasingly intertwined, at both their costs.

In discovering the Gelet, Sophie and Mouth encounter an intelligence so alien from human comprehension, twenty generations of human colonists have never communicated with them. Anders’ physical description of the Gelet resembles Lovecraft, but once you internalize their appearance, that comparison ends. The struggle to communicate across species more resembles writers like Stanisław Lem or China Miėville, authors specializing in the true meaning of “alien.”

Readers expecting a “hero’s journey” for Sophie and Mouth will be bitterly disappointed. Anders doesn’t blow her nose on traditional story forms, but she also recognizes life doesn’t work that way. This story instead consists of connected vignettes from the heroines’ lives in what becomes permanent, rootless exile. Themes develop in fits and starts, and lessons learned consist of what the characters extract by force.

And force it is. Planet January is constantly violent. The interplay between the searing daylight and ice-choked night creates an environment of perpetual scarcity and conflict. Xiosphant prevents barbarity overtaking the population by granting the state a monopoly on violence, a monopoly they use with brutal efficiency. Argelo has no such monopoly, so life is constant bellum omnia contra omnes, the city little more than an ongoing turf war.

The Gelet city provides an antidote to this polarization, if Sophie and Mouth can only convince humanity. Forced by the planet’s evolutionary stimuli, and empowered by an ability to communicate with complete coherence, the Gelet have overcome their physical limitations and built something durable. Assuming the humans don’t break it. And assuming humans have an expansive ability of what “humanity” will ultimately mean.

Anders writes about the common struggle: humans must adapt to our circumstances, natural or technological, but we’re also resistant to change, preferring the comfort of familiarity, even when familiarity is killing us. The novel ends in motion, as one conflict between change and familiarity ends, and another gets rolling. Because, Anders implies, this duality is normal. Humans just learn to live with it, or die resisting. To Anders, it seems, there is no easy middle ground.