Charlie Jane Anders’s Nebula award-winning debut All The Birds in the Sky (2016) was a quirky if ramshackle combination of futuristic science and magic that held together largely through the charm of Anders’s voice. Her follow-up is a more carefully structured work: classic SF in the mode of Ursula K Le Guin or Octavia Butler. The planet January is tidally locked to its star, one side scorched by constant sunlight and the other a frozen wilderness of endless night, with human settlement confined to the narrow twilight zone between the two. Life is hard, sustained by ancient technologies that are starting to fail, the darkness behind the cities populated by terrifying monsters.
The story begins when student Sophie takes the fall for a theft by her roommate, the more confident and beautiful Bianca. Punishment is extreme: Sophie is thrown to the night-side to die. She survives by connecting with the alien “crocodiles”, telepathic creatures whose compassionate intelligence belies their giant pincers and tentacled hideousness.
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