The City in the Middle of the Night

Many centuries into the future, Earth has grown uninhabitable. Seven city-states came together to build the Mothership to move humanity to the stars, each responsible for a specific component: Calgary (?), Khartoum (?), Nagpur (interior design), New Shanghai (?), Ulaanbaatar (?), Zagreb (instruments, literature), ??? (?). The generations-long trip was, unsurprisingly, fraught with intercultural conflict. After several mini-wars, the Hydroponic Garden Massacre (of the Nagpuri), and Mothership failures, they at last arrived at January.

This new planet is itself barely hospitable. Tidally locked, it has a slim terminator between scorching sun and freezing total darkness. There, nestled between two mountains shielding them from the extremes, they built Xiosphant. A great deal of care was taken in its initial construction, from its tight street grid to the detailed carvings on its oldest buildings.

Those days are long gone, but the city's culture remains extremely rigid. Their multiple currencies function more or less like ration cards. The citizens' daily lives are governed by a doctrine called Timefulness. Their language is highly complex and features syntactic elements for specifying formality, the social statuses of speaker and listener, and the exact time of day. Discussing one's Mothership heritage is highly frowned upon in Xiosphant, though the aristocracy is decidedly descended from the Calgary and New Shanghai compartments. The city as we see it in the early chapters feels constantly on the brink of social revolution—or like it would be if the residents weren't so exhausted from running in circles every day.

Indeed, the city has seen its share of revolts and wars. The original New Shanghai and Calgary populations had, by virtue of their contributions to the Mothership, held disproportionate influence among its inhabitants, and their descendants maintained that influence all the way to Xiosphant. Active acts of oppression against the others led a sizable group to eventually depart and build their own city, Argelo. The two cities have alternately traded and fought ever since; the last such cycle ended in complete isolation.

Argelo's culture in many ways reflects its origin as a reaction to Xiosphant's. People proudly display their heritage through their clothing. They have a single currency, no official timekeeping, a thriving club scene, and (on paper at least) no aristocracy. Despite the lack of a unified state as in Xiosphant, Argelo is still very much an oligarchy. It's controlled by nine families whose frequent skirmishes soak the streets in blood.

By far the greatest similarity between these cities (and the few frontier settlements) is the ever-present specter of decline. Argelo's carefree atmosphere masks looming food shortages. Erosion of the Young Father has exposed Xiosphant to more merciless sunlight. Whole technologies have been lost to time, and major infrastructure, particularly computers and communication equipment, is falling apart across the planet. Acidic storms are becoming more and more frequent. Some of the outlying settlements have turned to piracy to survive. And that's to say nothing of the planet's natural fauna. Humans are very much out of place on January.

Humans are not, however, the only sentient beings on the planet.

The book's prologue strongly echoes the epilogue of The Handmaid's Tale. Both take place well after the primary plots and identify their respective texts as historical documents. While this frame works splendidly for The Handmaid's Tale, it rings hollower for The City in the Middle of the Night.

By granting us closure on some aspects of its narrative and sowing doubt about others, the epilogue The Handmaid's Tale both invites us deeper into its fiction and invites us to question features of our own world. The narrator's account, now recontextualized as a priceless primary source on Gileadean society, is of dubious provenance. While broadly in line with other sources, her story differs in enough key details to render its veracity debatable. This is a common occurrence in real-world archaeology. How do we compile overlapping but contradictory sources into a unified understanding of history? How do we address these complexities without getting bogged down by them or omitting them altogether? How much of what we think we know about history is derived from unreliable sources, sources who either misunderstood or outright lied about events?

The City in the Middle of the Night, by contrast, uses its prologue mostly as a hook. It tells us that the story to follow documents the emergence of a new species and introduces the linguistic theme that will carry through the text. Unlike in The Handmaid's Tale, this detail is at best inconsequential and at worst detrimental to the overall story. The City in the Middle of the Night is told alternately in first person (from Sophie's perspective) and third person (from Mouth's). If we accept that this is a historical document, then who composed it? Certainly Sophie's chapters could be assumed to be memoirs, but what of Mouth's? Sophie's new body allows her to share her own thoughts but not to extract them from humans.

This is admittedly something of a nitpick. As mentioned above, the prologue is largely inconsequential.