It becomes easy to see the Gelet not only as monsters but as aliens instead of natives of a colonized nation. Our reading of the story is from a human-centric point of view that can’t be helped given the presumed humanity of this book’s audience. The Gelet serves as agents for one of Anders’s critiques of humanity. She is not the first to contact the Gelet, but the first in a long time to communicate with them, and her openness could change the course of the relationship between the two species. Most humans call them crocodiles, dismissing the Gelet as animals to be hunted and eaten, but Sophie learns that they are sophisticated beings that communicate a collective memory through the cilia and tendrils on their bodies. Miéville is at his most engaging when affectionately exploring the intersection between what it means to be human and what defines a monster, and Anders does likewise with Sophie’s relationship with the Gelet, a race of creatures who live in the freezing night side of the world. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness with her world of endless light and darkness, the deeply flawed humanity of her characters and the monsters that roam the roads and the edge of night. Among these four women betrayals abound.Īnders evokes memories of China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station and Ursula K. But, Alyssa and Mouth are “road buddies,” meaning keeping each other alive has become an unbreakable habit no matter how often one betrays the other. As far as she knows she is the last of her people, and being a first-rate assassin and smuggler who works the dangerous route between Argelo and Xiosphant, the chances of the Citizens becoming fully extinct are high. Mouth grew up on the road as a member of a nomadic tribe called the Citizens. The former grew up in Argelo, a chaotic city run by nine crime families, and spent her life as an arsonist before turning smuggler. Alyssa and Mouth make up the second couple. One pair is Sophie and Bianca, a lower-class student and her aristocratic roommate who dream of changing the clockwork oppression of Xiosphant, a city of endless daylight that regiments sleeping, waking and working through coded bells and heavy shutters that force the population into a prison-like nocturne. Set on January, a planet that stays in perpetual night on one side and day on the other (unideal for colonization due to its extremes, yet colonized anyway), the story focuses on two duos of female friends and the cities that made and recreated them. The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders is the type of queer-centered science fiction adventure that has reinvigorated the genre.
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