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 […]
Unsustainable human society hammered into the meridian of an alien planet
The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders