Patricia was an ordinary young girl until she spoke with a bird and learned she must be a witch. Laurence found plans online for a two-second time
machine, beginning a lifelong love affair with technology. They met as fellow outcasts in school, bonding through misery, but their lives would soon
veer in radically different directions... and, if one assassin's vision is correct, the two will one day bring about the end of the world in a
cataclysmic confrontation between magic and science.
Review
When a story threatens to end the world and kill the characters it has painstakingly created in my imagination, and my reaction as a reader is to
cheer on the apocalypse, something has gone wrong.
Just when All the Birds in the Sky lost me is difficult to pin down, but tremors could be felt early. Both Laurence and Patricia come from
miserable homes with parents whose sole goal seems to be thwarting their children's dreams and any chance they have to find happiness, misery that
takes on a surreal air in a world that contains both impossible magic and near-future technology. At first, I wanted to like them, but soon Laurence
and then Patricia devolve into self-described assholes, prone to terrible attitudes, weaselly actions, and general spinelessness, not to mention major
bouts of amnesia that, I guess, were supposed to wipe my mind too of major developments; that's the only reason I could think of for the plot-extending
lapses, unless the author wanted me to spend half the book shouting angrily at the characters (figuratively, of course - though I came close to actual
outbursts a time or two when they stretched my already-thin suspension of disbelief too far).
The setting retains a dreamlike quality throughout, with the public world of technology being every bit as exaggerated and implausible as the hidden world
of magic. Both are populated with swarms of characters I often couldn't keep straight, all of whom are broken and cold and manipulative in their own
ways, not to mention swarming with red herrings that nibble up too much page time simply to drive home the fact that society is broken beyond all
reasonable hope of repair. Even the birds are jerks, here. (How bad does a world have to be that I don't even care if the birds survive?)
In any event, the plot crawls and lurches between prolonged bouts of whining and self-destructive behavior by Laurence and Patricia as everything inches
toward the prophesied apocalypse, reliant on forced circumstances and deliberately botched efforts at communication to ratchet up tension and stakes...
though, as I mentioned earlier, the stakes failed to ratchet up that high for me owing to the fact that I would've been just as happy seeing the lot of
them fall into a bottomless pit.
Skirting spoilers, by the end I was half-convinced that I was never really supposed to like or even believe in the world the characters inhabited as
anything but a metaphor. Which is fine, if that's what one likes. There are some interesting images and nice ideas at play here that I haven't seen
before, but the ideas alone couldn't make me care about the book when I couldn't care about the characters or believe their situations. This just isn't the
kind of story I enjoy reading, and not the kind I intend to read again if I can at all help it.
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.
These are trying times, no doubt about it. For many, the very foundations of our reality and the most basic things we have taken for granted
have been snatched away, twisted beyond recognition or just plain smashed to pieces. It's tempting to just give up, to decide that there's no
point in even trying to do something so seemingly frivolous as write or create. That, argues author Charlie Jane Anders, is precisely what one
shouldn't do. This collection of essays covers a range of topics, from basic writing advice to using despair and anger to fuel creativity to
understanding that creating escapes from reality and visions of other possible worlds is anything but a waste of time, even in times like
these.
Review
I've only read a few of Anders's works; while I like the ideas she explores, I find the stories themselves a bit hit-and-miss for my tastes.
That said, I rather enjoyed this collection of essays about keeping the will to write alive even when so much is going so very, very wrong in
the world. The writing advice itself is not altogether different from stuff I've picked up elsewhere, if delivered with solid style. The rest,
particularly on perseverance though trying and dangerous times and learning to value one's own creativity even when the world at large
diminishes it, is fresh and timely and well written (or spoken, as I listened to the audiobook version).
