They were closer to the night than the day, so they could just make out the ice shelf where the sea froze. But if you squinted at the horizon on your right, you could see where the water hit daylight and boiled, creating a wall of steam so high you couldn’t see the top.
Woo hoo, I’ve gotten to the last Hugo-nominated novel of 2020 with plenty of time to spare before the award ceremony on July 29th!
Charlie Jane Andrew’s novel is set on January, a planet where day and night are fixed in place, forever. It’s a story of two human cities surrounded on all sides by a murderous wasteland, with a race of aliens that most of the city-dwellers see as dangerous monsters, and a small handful of humans trying to find out where in all of that they actually belong.
The planet of January is tidally locked, meaning one side is permanently in darkness and the other side is facing the sun and on fire. The two human cities of Xiosphant and Argelo are both located in the same sliver of twilight between the sun side and the night side of the planet. Other than that they couldn’t be more different.
The political system of Xiosphant is probably the worst kind of totalitarianism, the kind that’s crushingly repressive for your own good. With no turning of the globe there’s no hours or days or seasons, so everything is run on a strict timer. The shutters on all buildings go up to seal everyone in darkness for curfew, and drop down for the working period. There’s about a dozen different kinds of money depending on whether you’re buying food or materials or services, and everyone has enough to eat as long as they work hard until they die. Getting married and having children is mandatory unless you can get a pass for higher education (and no, same-sex marriages or relationships aren’t allowed). Just sleeping or not sleeping at the wrong time is a crime, and the security forces are allowed to execute people for minor offenses to “protect society”, or “send a warning” or “because they didn’t want to bother with the paperwork”.
In contrast, Argelo (created by refugees from Xiosphant sometime after the generation ship from Earth landed on January) is a lawless, vibrant society. Several wealthy families are in control, and the only rule is to grab what you can and have as much fun as you can before the supplies run out. Sleep when you want, with whoever you want, and dance yourself into a drunken stupor at one of the many nightclubs. The city layout is a tangled maze, and with no set schedule or even a centralized method of keeping track of time, everyone lives in the moment or tries to figure out when things will happen based on what else is happening around them (for instance, you’ll know when you can buy your favorite candy if you know what the water level is in the reservoir across town). Life in Argelo can be a non-stop party, at least until food becomes too expensive to buy or you get caught in the crossfire when two or more of the Families have a running gun battle in the street.
All of this is seen in chapters that alternate from the point of view of Sophie or Mouth. Mouth used to be part of a nomadic tribe called the Citizens, who were all wiped out before they could give Mouth her adult name, NOT THAT SHE’S BITTER OR ANYTHING. Mouth now spends her time smuggling items between Argelo and Xiosphanti, trying to not think about the past too much (or ALL THE DAMN TIME) and getting pretty good at keeping most of fellow smugglers alive in the wastelands where death by animal attacks can happen in a pause between words. Finding out that there’s possibly a relic from her old tribe being kept in the palace in Xiosphant suddenly makes her life a lot more complicated.
And then there’s Sophie, who’s nowhere close to being a jaded and road-weary smuggler. She’s pretty and intelligent, but also cripplingly shy and massively unsure of herself. At the start of the book she seems to have made a somewhat comfortable life for herself in university, trying to not think about the future too much and hopelessly in love with her best friend, the elegant social climber Bianca. Sophie would do anything for Bianca, which is how she finds herself being dragged through a jeering crowd by police officers who toss her over the city wall and into the freezing night side of the planet to die.
Spoliers, Sophie survives, but she spends most of the rest of the book trying to get past this trauma. I don’t know if this needs a trigger warning, but some of the ways the author describes Sophie’s emotions after the attack sound like personal experience (like the passage “as things go from being ‘moments I need to survive right now’ to ‘things that will always have happened to me’). Fortunately something else happens to Sophie on the nightside of the world; she’s rescued by a type of monster that humans call “crocodiles” for lack of a better term, and she starts to learn a whole new way of seeing the world.
I love the intricate world that the author has created here, the complexities of the language, like how Argelan has no set word order and a million different ways to describe relationships, while Xiosphanti is so regimented that you change forms depending on the social status of the speaker, or listener, or how close you are to shutters-up or shutters-down. There are all kinds of fun details, like the fad of having music bands in Argelo play a boardgame while they’re performing so the audience can take bets on the outcome. Or the illicit parlor in Xiosphant that sounds like it might be a brothel but is actually a place where the employees are trained to pour coffee and talk soothingly and help their clients spend a few moments not thinking about time. I was constantly caught by surprise by references to “bison” or “cats” or any number of Earth words that are used for animals that are completely different from what I originally pictured. I know I’d prefer to live in the eternal party of Argelo rather than constantly jumping at the idea that I might be late for something in Xiosphant, but of course all that freedom doesn’t mean much if you’re one of the people who’s left to be free and homeless and starving and freezing to death on the nightside edge of the town because everyone’s only one run of bad luck away from dropping through the cracks. But in either town you can understand why there’s always someone who’s only goal is to change things.
“In my experience,” says Hernan, “absolutely everyone can pretend to be a pacifist, just so long as there’s enough money to go all the way around.”
The relationships are almost as complex as the politics and the world-building. Sophie circles around in Bianca’s orbit, desperate for a smile from her and willing to take on the entire world once she gets it, even though she can tell the entire time that there’s something wrong and off-balance with how Bianca worms her way into the lives of powerful people. At the same time Sophie becomes equally devoted to the crocodiles, who she renames the Gelet, and tries to convince someone, anyone, that they’re more than monsters or her trained pets. Both Mouth and Bianca are the kind of people who take grieving to an extreme degree, almost as if they’re more in love with grief than they were to the people they’re grieving for. 
And Mouth’s best friend and road buddy Alyssa is that refreshing kind of personality who will do anything to try to get Mouth through her latest trauma, while at the same time being completely unflappable in the face of Mouth’s bullshit. There’s so much variety here for how everyone expresses love: the I’ll-do-anything-for-your-happiness, the I-love-you-so-now-you-owe-me, the huddled conversation over tea after dark, the snarky inappropriate banter to cover how relieved someone is that they’ve lived one more day.
Things sometimes get a touch Young Adult in places (Sophie makes a near-death confession of love during a disastrous boat ride that goes way over the top). The author also gives some details about the original generation ship that I would have liked to see expanded on. Every nationality that joined the ship had their own compartment, and some terrible things happened between the compartments in the decades long trip from Earth. There are some scenes that come across as really timely now, with the people who descended from the oppressors on the ship telling the ones descended from the oppressed that dwelling on all of that is “not helpful”. But ultimately people’s ancestry doesn’t play as much of a part as the ongoing discussion of how to make things better for everyone, and what exactly “better” is supposed to look like. It’s very possible that all of this is going to be fleshed out more in a sequel, especially since the ending was on of those run-into-a-brick-wall types that manages to be hopeful at the same time that it’s very much “Wait, you’re going to end it there?”