The City in the Middle of the Night (Charlie Jane Anders)

The City in the Middle of the Night
Charlie Jane Anders
Tor
Fiction, Sci-Fi
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: Many generations ago, aboard a battered colony ship, humans came to the tidally-locked world of January, hoping to build a new home in the narrow strip between burning daylight and lethally-cold darkness... and barely survived. Now, what civilization remains mostly exists in two cities: Xiosphant, a rigid authoritarian state obsessed with strictly-enforced timekeeping, and Argelo, a chaotic place run by quarreling crime families. But with resources dwindling and the last technology of their ancestors wearing out beyond repair in the resource-poor land, even these holdouts of humanity may be living on borrowed time...
Sophie clawed her way to a place in the Gymnasium college of Xiosphant from a rough background on the city outskirts, hoping to make a better life for herself, only to be pulled into the orbit of her privileged roommate Bianca. They spend many a "night" - the period when windows are shuttered across the city, a strict curfew designed to encourage "natural" circadian rhythms on a world with no night and day cycle - whispering rebellious dreams of a future where Xiosphant may be freed from its rigid rules and tyrannical leaders, meeting up with fellow progressive students. Sophie just knows that Bianca will someday change their world, and would do anything to protect the girl she can't admit she loves (a forbidden notion in this city, girls loving girls) - so she takes the blame when the city guards raid a meeting. As punishment, Sophie is sent to her certain death, beyond the mountain on the night side of Xiosphant, where she runs into a deadly native "crocodile"... but, instead of killing her, it forges a telepathic connection, upending everything Sophie was taught about January.
As a child, Mouth was raised by the nomadic people known as the Citizens, who traveled endlessly between the world's two cities and outlying settlements, back when travel was even possible. But the others were slaughtered, leaving her the sole survivor to remember their ways. She joined up with a smuggler group, the Resourceful Couriers, the closest thing left to traders between Argelo and Xiosphant in these dangerous times, but it's not the same, and there's still a huge hole in her heart. Then, in Xiosphant, she learns that the city ruler holds a sacred Citizen artifact known as the Invention in the palace vaults: a compendium of the lost people's knowledge and myths, things even Mouth never learned in her time among them. Her obsession to rescue this last vestige of her lost people leads her into the orbit of a group of student radicals plotting an attack against the palace - a group led by a young woman named Bianca.

REVIEW: Set in an inhospitable world of extremes - social, physical, and biological - at a time of disruption, The City in the Middle of the Night offers a decently realized setting and flawed characters, most of whom learn the hard way that even the best intentions and ideas rarely survive contact with the battleground of the real world, and even love may not be enough to stop everything from falling apart.
Sophie starts out a naive student, dazzled by new ideas and new opportunities at the Gymnasium, but mostly by the wealthy party girl Bianca. In a culture that considers same-sex attraction taboo, she does not even recognize her own infatuation with her roommate, falling into orbit around the stronger personality and getting caught up in other people's ideas and goals. When an act of petty theft threatens to derail Bianca's plans and "destiny" (in Sophie's eyes) to change their rigid society for the better, Sophie takes the blame... not knowing the guards intend to not just jail her, but make an example of her as a warning to other young radicals. Still, she's perfectly willing to die knowing that Bianca will be spared - and then she meets "Rose", the "crocodile" (many animals and plants on January carry names from Earth, for all that the descriptions make it clear how unlike their Earth namesakes they are) who turns out to be not a mindless killer animal, but an intelligent species with a civilization far older than humanity itself. For the first time, Sophie has a purpose that is not Bianca-shaped, hiding at a tea house on the fringes of the city (terrified of being spotted and identified as someone who should technically be dead; her post-traumatic stress over the near-execution haunts her for most of the novel) while sneaking out to the dark to meet up with "Rose" and exchange memories and a few smuggled trade goods... but the alien may have an ulterior motive, one that will eventually put her at odds with her own people.
Mouth, meanwhile, starts out rather unlikable, jaded and prone to self-isolating even with her closest smuggler companion Alyssa. Witnessing the gruesome deaths of the Citizens left a seeping wound in her soul that nobody else can understand, the loss of a culture no city-dweller would ever comprehend; she is haunted as much by what she never had a chance to know - she never completed the rites of passage that would have given her an adult name - as what she remembers. Only when she hears of the Invention in the Xiosphant palace - a blasphemy, seeing a sacred item of a traveling people kept in the vault of a city-dweller - does she come alive, determined to rescue it from the clutches of outsiders and reclaim some small token of the heritage that was torn from her. That plan involves cozying up to a group of local radical students and their leader Bianca, feigning sympathy and support but all the while just hoping to use them and their ill-conceived plans as a means to get into the palace. When things inevitably go south, the Resourceful Couriers wind up escorting fugitives Bianca and Sophie to the distant city of Argelo, a journey with fateful consequences for all involved, as relationships are realigned and true colors are revealed.
The world Anders crafts is interesting, with numerous odd native lifeforms and various human innovations and adaptations to life on a tidally-locked world (that almost seems a bit on-the-nose as a metaphor for individuals and societies struggling to find a survivable balance between light and dark). There are allusions to a deep, generations-long history on the planet January and even further back, through the generational mother ship to Earth, and all the cultural and historical entanglements that implies. While Xiosphant enforces cultural conformity, insisting that forgetting the past is the only way to heal the future, Argelo emphasizes exploring and expressing one's heritage. The ways in which people honor, distort, or attempt to erase the yesterdays that became today form one of the book's themes, along with explorations of cultural exploitation and appropriation (intentional and otherwise), societal upheaval and change, climate collapse colliding with tribalism, toxic relationships, trauma responses, and more. These themes can sometimes feel a little heavy-handed, for all that they acknowledge the complexities involved, offering no clear-cut answers or preachy Lessons. Characters could also be complex, though I admit getting frustrated by Sophie's persistent inability to see the truth about Bianca long past the point where that truth was readily visible (and she herself acknowledged it, before falling right back into her old schoolgirl-with-a-crush habit to inevitably disastrous consequences). It ultimately lost a half-star for an abrupt and ambiguous ending that made me check the audiobook file twice to make sure it hadn't somehow skipped a chapter or three of wrap-up, plus the aforementioned frustration and some meandering of the story now and again.

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