Charlie Jane Anders’ novel The City in the Middle of the Night might soon come to a television (or other screen) near you: Deadline is reporting that Sony Pictures Television has optioned the novel to develop it into a TV series.
Anders’s book published earlier this year with Tor Books. It’s set on a distant, tidally-locked world called January, with two cities on either side: the freewheeling Argelo, and Xiosphant, which is strictly regimented. A student named Sophie is exiled by Xiosphant’s oppressive government, and is rescued by the planet’s native inhabitants, the Gelet. They want to try and connect with humanity, and she might be the perfect person to help them bridge the gap between civilizations.
Sony will produce the show along with Mom de Guerre Productions and Sharon Hall, an executive producer for another notable science fiction series, The Expanse. An option on the series doesn’t automatically mean that it’ll make its way all the way through development to become a series; NBC optioned Anders’ story “Six Months, Three Days” back in 2013, but there has been no update since. Keep track of this and other story-to-screen SFF adaptation projects in the works in our massive list.
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The City in the Middle of the Night
Why do people act like this book is radical? The premise is that totalitarianism is bad and so are gangsters (which seems fairly uncontroversial). All the activists are evil and dumb enough to follow a spoiled teenager. The book is called queer scifi but the clearly queer relationship is a shy girl with an unrequited crush on a pretty, evil girl.
But mostly this book makes me mad because it justifies genocide. Throughout the book, everyone tells the main character to get over the genocide of her whole society.
SPOILERS
In the end, she decides to work with the aliens who committed genocide. Anders justifies the genocide because the aliens were protecting their babies and the aliens are definitely the good guys. To make things worse, the society is somewhat inspired by Romani people, Jews and Native Americans. (Anders tried to make this better by having a Jewish character but she doesn’t act like a jew. Nobody who goes to synagogue every week also says their favorite food is pork buns and doesn’t even make a joke about it.) Genocide is never justified. Never.