This is a long novel, and it’s not in a hurry to get where it’s going. It’s well done if hardly original – decades ago Star Trek’s Captain Picard met aliens who saw human beings as “ugly bags of mostly water”. Humans loathe the alien Gelets, and to the Gelets we are “piles of hot meat, giving off fear chemicals”. The main narrative is about the possibility of rapprochement between humans and aliens. She survives by connecting with the alien “crocodiles”, telepathic creatures whose compassionate intelligence belies their giant pincers and tentacled hideousness. Punishment is extreme: Sophie is thrown to the night-side to die. The story begins when student Sophie takes the fall for a theft by her roommate, the more confident and beautiful Bianca. Life is hard, sustained by ancient technologies that are starting to fail, the darkness behind the cities populated by terrifying monsters. 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. Her follow-up is a more carefully structured work: classic SF in the mode of Ursula K Le Guin or Octavia Butler. C harlie 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.
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