The City in the Middle of the Night

"This is Charlie’s first time on the Clarke Award shortlist, but she’s already very well known within the science fiction community and has had multiple other award nods for both her fiction and nonfiction, for example a Hugo Award nomination for the podcast she runs with the science fiction author Annalee Newitz . They were also both involved with the io9 website, which has been a touchstone for science fiction fandom over the years, and while they’re not connected with it now, how I first came to know Charlie was through her massively enthusiastic coverage—and sometimes provocative argument and debate—of the Clarke Award back in the day. Is she a frontrunner for this year’s prize? I think there are a lot of people who would love to see her win, for sure. “An alien world gives you the opportunity to explore both this strange new planet and, also, humanity” I said earlier that each of the books on this year’s shortlist features a classic science-fiction trope, and this book is what we might call a ‘planetary romance’ in that it’s set on a single alien planet rather than within, say, a galaxy-spanning empire. An alien world gives you the opportunity to explore both this strange new planet and, also, humanity. From that point of view, it’s absolutely harking back to the classics of science fiction. It’s also playing with a younger cast in terms of its characters, which is very important for what you were saying about the new science fiction fandoms. This is not a YA book , but YA is a category that could be applied. If you read it as a younger teenager, I suspect you could identify with it hugely, in the same way you might identify with the young central character of a classic science fiction novel like Dune , which is not YA either, but we could argue it’s much easier to identify with a protagonist closer to your own age rather than another square-jawed hero. Okay, let’s talk about literally the world of Charlie’s book: it’s a planet called January that’s tidally locked to its star. Exactly. In this way you could say it’s similar to a previous Clarke Award winner called Dark Eden , which was set on a planet that had come untethered from its sun—it still maintained atmosphere and rotated, but it was lit entirely by bioluminescence. The minute you start playing with something that’s not exactly Earth-like in that kind of big way, that’s going to have ripple effects across every single thing you write and here a big plot point is that our human protagonists are living by necessity in the thin zone between the two states, the habitable line between burning and freezing. You establish this one plot point, and immediately you have to start playing the big science fictional game of ‘what if?’ Why are humans on this planet? How might societal rules and structures change to cope with this environment? Can the planet support non-human live in the extreme areas? If so, how would it have evolved to survive? What does it look like? Similarly, Kameron Hurley’s book The Light Brigade is a take on the trope of military science fiction, and is set in a world in which armed forces can be transported instantaneously across vast distances to different intergalactic battlefields, and here the ‘what ifs?’ of world building are constructed from the rules of this instantaneous transport—the science of faster-than-light travel, time dilation and, crucially, what happens if the technology starts seeming to break down? “Immediately you have to start playing the big science fictional game of ‘what if?’ How might societal rules and structures change to cope with this environment?” Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Cage of Souls is what we call the ‘dying Earth’ trope. It’s set at the end of our world: the sun is dying, the Earth is dying. So in many ways it’s not so much world building as much as world dismantling. He’s playing with the idea of a society that’s forgotten more than it ever knew—it’s a technology-based world, but it’s riffing off of Sir Arthur C. Clarke’s famous maxim that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And with A Memory Called Empire , we might call that an exploration of the ‘intergalactic empire’ trope; a story that encompasses the broad sweep of the universe rather than a single planet or solar system, and with those you’re not building a world, you’re building worlds, which is actually very tricky to do. The classic cliché here is the one-thing-all-planet world which Star Wars is famous for: the desert planet, the city planet, the forest planet, and so on, and so on. You could argue a book like Dune is just as guilty, except the environment of the planet is essential to the narrative of the book. It’s the entire point, not just a backdrop setting. Whereas Star Wars is just like: oh, yeah, desert planet, right! chase scene! lightsaber fight! And so on. If you’re going to build something that’s believable, you might only see bits of world, but you need to feel that the author knows what would happen if a character walked out of the city and kept going. Presumably you’d find cities with different languages, different money, different cultures. Rather than: ‘this is the planet of the engineers!’ You know what I mean. Like: ‘oh, hi, we’re all warriors on this planet!’ You know, sometimes that’s absolutely fine and even to be encouraged, depending on the kind of story you’re trying to tell, but I would stress that the construction of a convincingly science fictional world is both a definite skill and also one of the real pleasures that keeps readers coming back to the genre. Actually, that’s the first time I thought about it specifically in terms of culture shock. World building can come in for quite a bad rap sometimes—like, an author can be all world building, no plot. Even just that name ‘world building’ sounds like you spent all your time assembling and drawing the map and working out the local economy. You’ve got spreadsheets about, you know, exchange rates for continents that the characters never go to. Some people love that kind of nuance and detail, but other people are just like, ‘get to the point.’ But the idea of culture shock is perhaps more interesting. The way that, if you are going abroad you’re going to notice the familiar in new ways—you know, suddenly becoming attached to brands we recognise, because you want to go somewhere where you don’t have to figure out the menu, you know. But also, you’re looking for the new: actively stepping away from the tourist map and down a different street to find out what’s there. So maybe culture shock is an important part of world building. But, you know, as a writer you might want to throw people in at the deep end, but it probably helps if you give them at least a backpack full of supplies and some clues back to where their hotel is. As an author you need to work out whether you are taking people on a tour, or robbing them as they get off the bus and leaving them to make some kind of sense of things on their own. Whatever we call it, though, I think the whole point of why so many people find science fiction such an appealing genre is what we might as well call ‘world building’; that sense that, actually, you can really sense the place that you’re in. That’s going to be true, even in the one that’s primarily set on Earth."