Five centuries from now, humankind will construct the Mothership, a multi-generation spacecraft that will carry thousands of colonists from a depleted Earth to their descendants’ future home on a new planet. January is a world that has the capacity to support life, but is different from Earth in one major respect: January is tidally locked, with one half existing in total darkness, the other broiling in perpetual, cancer-causing sunlight. The narrow strip of habitable land between the two dwells in twilight, a condition the human settlers adjust to in differing ways.
Many generations and wars later, the two surviving cities on January have arrived at a kind of stalemate. Xiosphant is authoritarian and austere. Its citizens live by clock-time, with day and night artificially simulated through a mandatory system of shutters and curfews The class structure of Xiosphant is equally rigid, with the respect a citizen is afforded largely dependent on which ‘compartment’ of the Mothership their ancestors travelled in. The city of Argelo, by contrast, is a free-spirited party-town, a capitalist oligarchy whose inequalities largely remain hidden from the general populace and whose nine ruling families seem more interested in internecine squabbles than the business of government. Between the two range the Smugglers, bands of rugged individuals who forge their livelihoods shunting goods from Argelo to Xiosphant and back again.
Far out in the frozen wastes there exists a third city, the City in the Middle of the Night, home to the planet’s indigenous inhabitants, key to the planet’s true nature. The human settlers have triggered a climate catastrophe on January without even realising it. If their new world is to survive, they must learn how to co-operate, not only with each other, but with the native inhabitants of the world they have almost destroyed.
The themes of the novel – the legacy of colonialism, racism, cultural appropriation and class prejudice, community, found family, the tensions between inherited tradition and lived identity – are familiar from much of the award-winning science fiction and fantasy of recent years. The City in the Middle of the Night though is ultimately a novel about climate change: the ways in which human behaviour impact on the environment, the cataclysmic effect of such behaviour on non-human populations. The story follows Sophie and Bianca, college friends from Xiosphant, and Mouth and Alyssa, members of a gang of smugglers based in Argelo, four characters facing personal crises whose narratives will eventually coalesce.
If I had to single out one book as the most disappointing from this year’s Clarke Award shortlist, this would be that novel. Though full of potential in terms of both story and subject matter, The City in the Middle of the Night annoyed and frustrated me on almost every level. Whilst The Last Astronaut and Cage of Souls had their problems (poor prose style and unforgivable bloat respectively) they did at least keep me moderately entertained, the former through its propulsive plot and giant centipede-space-worm-thingies, the latter through some halfway decent styling and characterisation. The City in the Middle of the Night, unfortunately, is one long eye-roll.
Let’s start with the material that had potential. One aspect of this novel that caught my attention in a positive way was the treatment and discussion of language and the problems of translation:
People in Argelo had no real way of reckoning the passage of time, but they had plenty of ways to talk about regret. A million phrases to describe what might have happened, what you should have done. Several major sentence constructions in Argelan had to do with information that had been knowable in the past: knowledge that a person had taken to her grave, observations that could have been collected, texts that were no longer readable. The Argelans had developed dwelling on lost opportunities into an art form, but they couldn’t say with any precision when any of these doors had closed.
I love the ideas on display here, the exploration of cultures through their spoken and written languages, and as with A Memory Called Empire, I found myself wishing this aspect of the book had been exploited more. Similarly, the final section of the novel, which deals with Sophie’s decision to transition to alien form, gives richly detailed insights into humanity’s journey to January as well as the history, science and culture of the planet’s original inhabitants. Here we find passages that edge us towards a genuine sense of wonder:
In my dream, I enter another level of the midnight city: a river of solid ice that encases but does not feel cold, rushing into a frozen reservoir under a sky full of stars. I’ve never seen stars, except once at the Sea of Murder, and these keep growing and shrinking, changing their position, flaring and subsiding. Time rolls backwards, and tall cities emerge from the tundra, great gleaming fortresses that withstand storms and quakes for countless generations. These cities climb into the night, drawing energy from the relentless wind and the flows of water and lava under the surface, and then I see them being built piece by piece. A whole earlier Gelet civilisation rises up in front of me, after I already saw it fall.
There is also some interesting discussion around the settlers’ unthinking oppression of indigenous cultures:
The Citizens never even knew what they had done. They invented myths about the Gelet – servants of the Elementals, or teeth in the jaws of eternal darkness – but all of those fables were about what the Gelet could do for people, or to people. The Citizens had stayed blameless in their own cosmology, until the very end.
It is immensely frustrating to me that the way the book is structured means that these passages – imaginative, detailed sequences in which the adolescent machinations of the plot finally give way to interesting ideas – came so late in the novel that I no longer cared. The effect as a whole is one of being top-heavy: the bulk of the book disposable, the remaining kernel of brightness mired in pulp. When I first began to read The City in the Middle of the Night, its themes of clock-time versus lived time, together with its emphasis on young protagonists reminded me somewhat of Karen Thompson Walker’s 2012 geo-apocalypse story The Age of Miracles. I found that book’s soft-centredness similarly irritating, and the novel as a whole was ill-thought-through, though it was at least proficiently written and its languid, somewhat earnest style had a certain charm. I don’t recall much about its plot now, though I seem to remember that the main character, Julia, had an annoying crush on a skater guy, a narrative strand that did not deserve the obsessive focus it was afforded.
Julia’s self-indulgence was as nothing though when compared with the on-again, off-again, overblown juvenile relationship drama between Sophie and Bianca. In terms of its character development and correspondence to lived reality, The City in the Middle of the Night reads less like science fiction and more like (bad) YA romance.
Everywhere we go, people stare at Bianca… She’s wearing a sheer silver dress that leaves her shoulders and most of her legs exposed, a wrap made of loose filaments, and silver sandals… I’m wearing a golden dress made out of some fabric I’ve never seen before that clings to my body in coruscating ripples.
‘Everybody is going to stare at me,’ I grouse under my breath.
‘Good,’ Bianca claps her hands. ‘They should. You look glorious.’
She’s wearing some fragrant oil, and every time I breathe it in, I feel dizzy, half wild with joy, out of control. We’re holding hands! In the street! We’re going to dance together, just the two of us, at some club that has walls made of speakers and air made of glitter. I can’t help feeling like this is buoyant fantasia, like I fell asleep watching an opera, and now I’m dreaming in song.
The whole Bianca/Sophie narrative is like something from a Mills & Boon novel, bubbling with heightened emotion expressed as a series of embarrassing cliches, bringing to mind the breathless crushes and apocalyptic breakups that characterised the picture-stories I remember from teenage magazines. There is little here that could be filed under ‘convincing, adult depiction of actual human relationship’. The segments (like the one above) set in Argelo, with their gushing descriptions of food and drink and clothing and vaguely outre behaviour have all the storm-in-a-teacup drama and faux transgressiveness of a midnight feast at Mallory Towers, and with an amusingly similar chasteness:
‘They’re hosting a giant formal ball, with two of the other families, and I just scored the two of us an invite. Absolutely everyone who matters in this town is going to be there.’ [Bianca] claps her hands together. ‘We’ll have to get ball gowns made, and borrow some jewelry, and dance until we can’t even see straight, and then dance some more, and it’s going to be epic.’
Seriously? In an adult novel?? And what is it with Bianca and the hand-clapping??? Every time Bianca is excited about something, there she is, clapping her hands. And this nonsense goes on and on. The relationship between these two emo kids (who are supposed to be plotting a revolution, by the way – some of the plot lines from Scooby Doo were more convincing) accounts for many, many pages and vast amounts of soul-searching. Clearly it’s intended to be the emotional centre of the novel. Yet the syrupy, one-note characterisation is simplistic and embarrassing; the banter, the smart, quippy dialogue, the unambiguous, feelgood morality tiresomely familiar from a hundred TV shows and superhero movies. And did the characters themselves – who we are supposed to like, to sympathise with, to feel empathy for – have to be so deluded? It’s obvious from page 1 that Bianca is a shallow, self-seeking manipulator. Why does it take Sophie three hundred-plus pages to get over her?
The characters’ naivete and lack of depth is a constant distraction from what might have been an interesting story. Neither is this broad-brush approach a problem that is limited to characterisation. Many of the key sequences relating to the novel’s thematic concerns are lacking in subtlety, manifesting as undigested chunks of polemic badly disguised as human interaction. Again and again, the theme and intention are clear but the execution is bland: characters shouting passages of semi-digested polemic at each other through a megaphone. Reading The City in the Middle of the Night put me in mind of how I felt as I struggled to find positives in Becky Chambers’s A Closed and Common Orbit for Sharke 2018: you can see what the author is doing and while what she is doing might be valuable in terms of opening up science fiction to certain themes and arguments, in terms of their literary impact such novels fall disappointingly short. Flat, didactic and banal, they lack complexity, ambiguity, or nuance.
I find it interesting to note that in the case of both Anders and Chambers (and Arkady Martine, come to that) the parts of their novels I found most satisfying by far were those sequences in which their authors seemed to forget about the plots and characters, concentrating instead on the factual aspects, the subjects – linguistics, geology, biology, xenobiology, post-humanity, climatology – that form their novels’ scientific underpinning. Stripped back to their essence, we see the trajectory of what might have been. There is so much here worth examining. I only wish writers were being encouraged to examine it better.
Neither does it help to see a text scattered with the kind of inappropriate word usage and inconsistencies that seems designed to throw any observant reader out of the story. ‘The layers of permafrost unfold like wings, spreading open to reveal the naked ocean below’, and ‘unsteady fragments of tundra’ are both startlingly inaccurate depictions of what Anders is actually trying to describe, which is a layer of sea ice, or pack ice, breaking apart beneath her attack vehicles. There are also occasional, inappropriate references to time as it is measured on Earth, not January, detailed descriptions of battles that ‘even with the night vision’ would in fact be mostly experienced as a terrifyingly indistinct blurring of shapes and movements, Sophie immediately knowing how to operate a computer when ‘nobody talks to the Mothership, not for twenty generations’. Oh, and here we go again with the permafrost: ‘Alyssa executed a three-point turn, and then coasted the vehicle across a thin sheet of permafrost that seemed to tremble as they passed over it.’ Permafrost, n, is ground that remains continuously frozen for two or more years, located on land or under the ocean. In other words, not ice. It feels mean of me to harp on details like this, and anyone can make a mistake, but for me as a reader, such carelessness at the sentence level serves only to further weaken a text that is already weak.
I suspect that The City in the Middle of the Night has come in for particularly harsh criticism from me at least in part because I came to it straight after reading The Old Drift, a novel that in terms of its depth of field, technical ambition and all round literary ability surpasses it in ways and means too numerous to mention. Once again, I find myself in the position of having to explain that it is not the book as such that is a problem – it has a right to exist, and readers certainly have the right to enjoy it – but the fact of its position on the Clarke Award shortlist. It is easy to see why the judges might have been attracted to some of the themes Anders’s novel is centred on, but like so much of the current output, The City in the Middle of the Night is suffused with the sense of having been written for a particular fandom at a particular time. The nomination of such books for awards would seem to be the result of a current and increasingly widespread tendency to judge novels according to what they appear to be about, rather than how those themes are tackled in terms of words on the page. For me personally, this counts as slipshod, one-sided criticism, a criticism that is concerned with the promotion of particular ideas as opposed to the promotion of texts of genuine literary substance – texts that allow those ideas the depth and quality of consideration they deserve.
I believe passionately in the value of the written word in exploring and disseminating ideas. I believe especially passionately in the value of science fiction in pursuing a radical, progressive and diverse agenda. But I believe equally in close reading, for both readers and writers, in the study of how words are used and how stories are told. In the case of awards, and especially awards shortlists, I believe such attention to detail is of the highest importance, that it cannot, or at least should not, be deemed of lesser importance than context, theme or historicity.
The Clarke Award is for the best science fiction novel of the year, not the most popular. This is something every current and future award judge should bear in mind.