Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Unsustainable human society hammered into the meridian of an alien planet

The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders

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January is a tide-locked planet, one side permanently cold dark night, one blinding searing day, with human colonists clinging to precarious life on the narrow boundary.  Outside of the human cities the monsters will kill you if the planet doesn’t get you first. Xiosphant is a socially rigid city state, forcing the endless twilight into an intricate regime of well-ordered citizens.  “Everyone in Xiosphant was weirdly polite, just so long as you pretended all their made-up stuff was real.” Sophie is a student from the […]

Too Many Extremes

The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders

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In August, LittlePlat wrote about this book and I thought “huh, that sounds up my alley,” and I quickly bought it and started to read it. It took a while to get into, but by the second half of the book I couldn’t put it down, and spent a rainy day at the cottage finishing it up. I love the world building. Tidal locked planets seem to be a hot topic in sci-fi these days, and I’ve enjoyed reading some of the ideas about how […]

A Unique Read, Above All Else.

The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders

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If there is one thing that I can say about Charlie Jane Anders, is that she can commit to keeping things weird. Like, deeply, deeply, weird. She’s also not at all afraid to make ambitious leaps with her writing. Her first novel, All the Birds in the Sky was a broad, experimental urban science-fantasy mash-up, which ended up charming a lot of people. And while I could recognise the flashes of brilliance in the book, the whole thing didn’t come together in a way I […]

Marisol got into an intense relationship with the people on The Facts of Life…

As Good as New by Charlie Jane Anders

The Cartography of Sudden Death by Charlie Jane Anders

Six Months Three Days by Charlie Jane Anders

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Three shorts by Charlie Jane Anders, all audiobooks bought pretty cheaply on Audible (1 or 2 each) and all about various kinds of what-ifs regarding the space-time continuum. All of which goes pretty hand in hand with the fact that I woke up at 2am the other night and couldn’t get back to sleep and bingewatched the first season of “Future Man” which I honestly can’t recommend enough. That said! As Good as New This story begins with a young playwright/med student in year two […]

A very strange little book, but I liked it?

The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders

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This book was so weird! And yet, I liked it more than I liked her first book, which I just never gelled with. I’m not sure that I liked every bit of this book (hated some of it, actually) but overall it was interesting. It takes place on a tidally locked planet (a planet that doesn’t spin on its axis, so that one side is always in dark and the other in light). The planet is called January, and humans migrated there hundreds of years […]

Comprehensive, confusing world-building

The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders

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In what has been a bit of a theme for me so far this year, The City in the Middle of the Night took me a pretty long time to get into. I was more than a third through this book before it hooked but but once it got me, oh man, I was IN. It’s one of those books that seems to straddle science fiction and fantasy, with all the intensely new world that requires. Once that barrier is overcome, it’s a wild ride. Two […]



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