CHARLIE JANE ANDERS
The american writer tells us about the twilight world of her new novel
Explore The City In The Middle Of The Night in the company of the American SF novelist.
F or those of us who sometimes daydream of living on other planets, it’s easy to let the sheer excitement obscure the potential difficulties. As Charlie Jane Anders succinctly puts it as we discuss the idea of humanity being best evolved to live on Earth: “Any other planet is going to be a fixer-upper at best.”
It’s a subject that’s at the centre of Anders’ new novel, The City In The Middle Of The Night, which takes place on a tidally locked planet where one side is constantly in darkness and the other in light. Humanity lives in two cities, each located on a narrow strip of twilight where the temperature is neither too high nor too low. Her fascination with such planets began when she edited the website io9, and ran articles on research into these kinds of worlds.
“I got fascinated wondering what that would look like,” she says. “I read a bunch of scientific papers and I talked to some geophysicists and I was fascinated by questions like: how would you know when to sleep if the sun never rises or sets, and how would you organise your life?”
It’s a world we see primarily through the eyes of Sophie, whom we first meet as a member of a society where, in an effort to preserve circadian rhythms from Earth, everyone has to go to bed and to get up at the same time. “As I was developing that vision of a city of strict schedules, it sort of infected everything else,” says Anders. “Everything in the city is very regimented, everything in the city is very stratified and everybody has their place, everybody knows exactly what they’re supposed to be doing.”
LOSING SLEEP
For those who break the rules, the punishment can be drastic: to be thrown out into permanent night, where death awaits. Yet Sophie survives this fate with the help of native creatures evolved to live in darkness. Throw in the idea that the second city is an anarchic place where nobody sleeps, and these aren’t so far from the sort of ideas you could imagine Gene Roddenberry bringing to the table – where story and themes flow beautifully from the premise.
It’s tempting to see the novel, particularly its exploration of authoritarianism, as growing from life in Donald Trump’s America but, says Anders, the book was “mostly finished” by the 2016 presidential election, which she expected Hillary Clinton to win. “I would have written the book very differently if I’d known what kind of world it was going to come out into,” she says. “Maybe I would have just said, ‘Screw it, I’m going to write something more light and escapist because I feel that’s what we all need right now,’ but at the same time you also need books that more than ever ask these big questions about society and about how we structure societies, and about how we try to take care of everybody.”
At a personal-political level, Anders sees a role for storytelling. “I think that sometimes hearts and minds are changed by political invective,” she says, “and speeches and protests, and hearing friends and neighbours talk about wanting to support immigrants, and wanting to support LGBTQIA [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual] people. But I think that one of the most effective tools for changing hearts and minds is storytelling and having characters you identify with that you buy into their reality, and that those characters bring you into a world.”
WITHOUT LIMITS
Whether talking about her work or politics, empathy and making connections are ideas that recur in Anders’ conversation – and which you would guess will be central to her next project, a young adult space opera trilogy. It is, after all, at least in part about “people having feelings in the middle of space battles”. So are these books written to her younger self?
“I’m sure most YA writers to some extent write to their younger selves,” she says, but she also mentions writing for her friends’ children and her nephew. As for Anders when she was a youngster, it’s in part a familiar story: “When I was a teenager, I was a huge Doctor Who fan.” As for the new Doc, Anders says, “I’ve been loving Jodie Whittaker’s upbeat, curious, kind version of the Doctor, who feels like a wonderful synthesis of Davison, Troughton, Tennant, but also something wholly new. Anyone who loves Doctor Who should really be happy that this show is proving the Doctor is bigger than any one actor, or even any one gender, because the Doctor is bigger and more amazing than such paltry limits.”
Less predictably, she also namechecks Doris Lessing, for her Children Of Violence sequence, which anticipates what we now call slipstream fiction by moving, over five books, from realism and memoir, via magical realism, to dystopian SF. “I talk about [these books] constantly because I’m still amazed she got away with this,” says Anders.
To judge by her work, Lessing retained a dogged optimism throughout her life. Back in the 21st century, is Anders an optimist or a pessimist? She once gave a TEDx talk entitled “The Paranoid Optimist”, she says, which about sums things up. “I’m optimistic about the future, but also terrified about all the bad things that I know are going to happen.”
The City In The Middle Of The Night is published by Titan Books in February.