Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Charlie Jane Anders, author of this, her new novel, The City In The Middle Of The Night. published in February by Tor. She’s the organizer of the Writers with Drinks series and was a founder of i09, a website about sci fi, science and futurism, Her stories have appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Lightspeed, Tin House and lots of anthologies. Her novel, Six Months, Three Days won a Hugo Award.
The City In The Middle Of The Night explores a land where night and day, miserable and extremely hot and cold nights and days, compete with each other, while a very narrow perimeter allows a scrappy but flawed civilization to claw out an existence, more than subsistence, but less than bucolic.

This, because the planet is rotationally locked with its sun, just as our moon is rotationally locked with our planet, which is why we see only one side of the moon and have no idea what they other side looks like other than the recent Chinese lunar lander.

A mothership has left our dying planet for a generations long trip to this planet, not knowing what will be found there, and as the new residents try to creat a habitable world, the mothership revolves slowly up above, mythologized and revered.

The cold war of two cities on this planet form the loose thread of this novel. Two women, almost lovers, very close friends have a relationship which evolves, as does this “war” over the course of this book. The two protagonist are joined with a panoply of well drawn peripheral friends as each faction tries to achieve control or power over the other.

Added to this story is that of an alien life, misunderstood by some but embraced, literally and figuratively by the hero of our story.