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Clara Sherley-Appel (CSA): This is The Story Behind the Story I’m Clara Sherley-Appel, and my guest today is Bay Area author Charlie Jane Anders. She is the author of the 2016 novel All the Birds in the Sky, which won the 2017 Nebula Award for Best Novel, the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel, and the Crawford Award. It was also a finalist for the 2017 Hugo Award for Best Novel. As if that weren’t enough, she is also the founding editor of the sci-fi website io9, organizer of the Writers With Drinks reading series in San Francisco, and the recipient of the 2005 Lambda Literary Award, the 2009 Emperor Norton Award, and the 2012 Hugo Award for her other fiction. Her latest novel, The City in the Middle of the Night, comes out this February, and it’s the topic of our conversation today. Charlie Jane Anders, welcome to Story Behind the Story.


Charlie Jane Anders (CJA): Yay! I’m so excited to be here. Thank you so much for having me.


CSA Absolutely! Thank you for being here. For readers whose first introduction to your work was All the Birds in the Sky, I think it would be easy to believe you were birthed – like Athena – fully formed and with a clear and distinctive writing style and voice. CJA laughs But of course, I mean we know that’s not how it works. It takes time to develop a voice. So how did you develop your voice as a writer, and when did you start to feel that you had come into your own?


CJA I mean it took a long time. I don't feel like I’ve reached the end of that process. To be honest I feel like I’m still developing my voice as a writer a lot. It was, you know, a period of many years of kind of writing tons and tons of fiction which mostly got rejected, or published in really small venues, and occasionally I would break into a larger venue, and then go right back to being rejected or only published in smaller venues. It was like, it was a long period of kind of scratching at the door trying to get in. Meanwhile, just kind of experimenting a lot with different styles and different genres actually, and different types of writing, trying to find what worked for me. And a lot of what worked for me was kind of trying to take what I would consider my main strengths as a writer which are you know humor and silliness and absurdity, and kind of weird off-beat ideas and kind of quirky, strange stuff. Trying to take those strengths and develop other stuff to go with them, like emotion and character; and like, 3-dimensional characters, king of a sense of story that had a core to it—that had like, a center to it that was like, you know, an emotional thing. And that was something that I spent years and years and years struggling with, and I still struggle with it. And what you see in my latest book, the one that comes out in February, THE CITY IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT, is that I’ve kind of started to deliberately dial the humor way back, and the quirkiness, and the silliness way back in order to really focus on developing on the characters and emotion and storytelling and the kind of nuts and bolts stuff that having a lot of wacky humor can sometimes let you skate past not doing. So this book kind of represents me making another attempt to develop my writing style in a different way, and kind of challenge myself in a different way. And I think that that’s the story of being a writer, is that you keep challenging yourself, you keep pushing your limits and trying to do things that you haven’t done before. You know, if you’re lucky it works out, but either way, you have to keep trying new things and pushing yourself, or you kind of start to burn out, or get bored with your own work, or atrophy or just… you can’t kind of just, you can’t be like “Okay I’ve developed my Voice and now I’m done.” That’s not how it works.


CSA How long have you been writing fiction?


CJA Oh, wow! I mean, definitely... I would say almost 20 years now. You know my earliest fiction publications were I think around 2000/2001. I’ve been working at it for a long time. You know, it’s been a goal of mine. It’s been something that I’ve been kind of, that I decided was my career for a long time before I was making any money at it. Like, it was one of those things where I kept saying that writing fiction was my real career or my real job and everything else was my day job. But literally I was making, I think that the amount of money I was spending on my fiction writing in terms of just envelopes and postage and computer stuff and whatever, I was actually making a loss on it for a long time. 


CSA What’s a typical day look like for you?


CJA I mean, now that I’m no longer working at io9 and I don’t have a day job anymore, a typical day is often just structured around just trying to get as much writing done as I can in a day. And it really depends, like sometimes there’s other stuff going on; I have to do promotional appearances or have meetings or talk to people or whatever. But you know a day where i don’t have anything else going on, I you know somewhere in there I take a really long walk—I walk up really steep hills; that helps to get the writing brain going for some reason. I will spend some time sitting in a cafe. I also will work on my fiction at home. Sometimes I’ll work on one writing project at home, and then go sit in a cafe and work on a different writing project and then go home again. It really varies, but there’s a lot of walking and sitting and I exercise in various other ways. There’s a lot of exercise. Mostly it’s a lot of just sitting and concentrating and trying to figure out stuff. I’ll have some days where I’ll try to write a few thousand words that are mostly garbage to try to figure out where the story is going or what I'm trying to do. And often I produce a lot a words and then, it’s not actually that those words are going to be in the book or the story, it’s just that I’m, they help me to clarify stuff.


CSA How do you avoid getting dispirited when you’ve written a pretty large chunk of text that you know won’t make it in?


CJA I mean, there’s no way to avoid getting dispirited. It just, it’s a part of the process and um I definitely have many many days where I feel like either I didn’t accomplish anything in my writing, or I actually went backwards! I backslid, I kind of threw away stuff I had already come up with but I didn’t come up with anything new, or you know, I just spent an entire day staring into space and I didn’t get anything real done, Or I just had so many other things going on that the writing really didn’t happen. And days where I feel like I didn’t accomplish anything or where I wrote a bunch of stuff but it was all garbage, it’s hard not to get a little bit discouraged. I think that part of what fuels the writing process and keeps you working at it day after day is this drive to accomplish something, or to get somewhere, or produce, you know, something that you’re going to be happy with. The flip side of that is that when you don’t produce, or when you produce stuff that ‘s kind of not great or when you’re just struggling, you’re going to get dispirited. You’re going to be struggling. And just kind of accepting that that’s part of the proces I guess is the best thing you can do. I don’t think that there’s any way to avoid it, to avoid those days where you just feel it’s not working and it’s all garbage and maybe I’ll never write anything good ever again, you know? I actually interviewed George R. R. Martin and he talked about that and how he has days where he’s just like, God, I’ve just lost it, like I can’t write, my writing is cgarabge, I’m writing down stuff that’s total crap, my brain’s not working and just, it’s really hard. Everybody has days like that. You’re going to beat yourself up, but you just have to kind of remember that these things happen, and that it’s probably not the end of the road if you have a couple of bad days.


CSA Alright, so on a happier subject, What is it about writing fiction that appeals to you? What draws you to science fiction and fantasy in particular?


CJA What I love about writing fiction is, actually to some extent, it’s the same thing that I love about reading fiction which is getting lost in a story, getting kind of sucked in and excited by what’s going to happen next, and really getting this connection to these fictional characters who start to feel like real people and start to have their own inner life, hopefully. And you know, when I read a book I like to be surprised by something that’s like, “Oh wow, that’s...I didn’t think that was what was going to happen, but that actually makes sense and it’s kind of awesome.” I also, when I’m writing, like to be surprised. I like to be surprised by stuff that kind of comes to me in the writing process, or that you know I hit on somehow; I’m like, “oh okay what if this happened? Oh that’s kind of interesting!” Or if the character’s like, randomly, through me trying to get into their heads and imagine what they’re thinking or what they actually would be wanting to do in this situation, they take a left turn that isn’t what I thought was going to happen next but actually leads to something interesting. I like to be surprised, I like to be kind of halleneged. Part of what I like about fiction is that you can explore big ideas and big questions without it being just an essay or whatever. And you can have people wrestling with all the questions that we wrestle with in real like, but you can kind of draw the margins differently if that makes any sense. Like, part of what is great about fiction is that you can deal with a lot of real-life stuff, but you get to define your terms a little bit more, and you get to say this is where the story starts and this is where the story ends, and these are the parts of the situation that we are going to include in the story because you can’t include every single part of someone’s life or every single possible factor that could be a part of the story. And so you get to kind of define what the boundaries are of the story a little bit more, and that let’s you kind of get a little bit more clarity sometimes on things that are hard to get clarity on in real life. But why I like writing Science Fiction and Fantasy in particular is really in a lot of ways has to do with the part about like, getting to ask big questions and getting to like, struggle with the stuff that we struggle with in real life but maybe get somewhere with it. Because in Science Fiction and Fantasy you can have these big thought experiments: “What if half the world population suddenly disappeared” or I don't know, something. And um, you can follow them to their logical conclusion. And they kind of lead you to being able to ask and maybe poke at and find possible answers to some of these big questions that are big questions in real life. It lets you kind of cope with all of the stuff that we cope with in real life about the world changing really quickly, things that used to make sense don’t make sense anymore, everything is confusing and weird and messed up, and we don’t understand the world in the way that we used to. And that kind of sense of dislocation and strangeness and weirdness and unreality is something that Science Fiction is really uniquely equipped to deal with, and so I think that that’s a really good thing.


CSA Which authors do you think do that especially well?


CJA People always mention Philip K. Dick who does the kind of strangeness and dislocation and “the ragged edge of reality”...he does that really well. Ursula K. Le Guin, obviously. I’ve been reading a lot of Le Guin lately and she’s really good at kind of finding the humanity in strange situations. And also something that I think that we need more of in our weird futures and imaginary worlds: She’s good at situating people inside community and societies that feel fleshed out and real and kind of, it’s not just an individual against a painted back drop, or a individual against society—it’s an individual in the midst of society, and society is part of what informs the story, always. These kind of social expectations and these subtle mythologies—these things bubbling under the surface in her work are part of what make it really interesting in that way. 
I always bring up Doris Lesing who is somebody that I’m obsessed with; her fiction has a lot of weirdness and change and literal dislocation. Like she had to, she left Africa, she left I guess the former Rhodesia, like, Zimbabwe, when she was young and moved to England and has this sort of post-colonial perspective in her fiction a lot of the time. But she also is really good at depicting people whose ideals are slowly being kind of torn apart by reality, and people who really, really believe in a cause or a principle or an idea, and slowly reality is kind of, you know, tearing that away from them. She’s, I don’t know, I think that her characters are really interesting and she captures something about confronting reality that I think is really interesting. Her stuff is very Science Fiction-al , at least some of the time. Even her realistic fiction feels, in some way like it you know, it has a lot of the tool kit of Science Fiction in there which I think it really interesting.


CSA This is Story Behind the Story on KSQD 90.7 FM. Stay tuned for more of my conversation with San Fransisco author Charlie Jane Anders after a short break. 


{BREAK}


CSA You’re listening to Story Behind the Story on KSQD 90.7 FM with me, Clara Sherley-Appel. My guest today is Bay Area author Charlie Jane Anders, author of the Award-Winning 2016 novel All the Birds in the Sky, and a slew of novellas, short stories, and nonfiction pieces that she’s published over the last few decades. We’re talking about her new novel, The City in the Middle of the Night, which was published earlier this year.
So, you mentioned world-building and one of the things that I think really stands out about your work is the richness of the worlds that are constructed in it. In January, which is the planet where all of the action happens in The City in the Middle of the Night – it’s no exception; it’s a very rich world. How do you approach that process of worldbuilding, and how do you avoid the classic sci-fi “info dump”?


CJA What I always say about world building is that it’s the stuff that you can’t just walk through. LIke, if there’s a wall in real life, you can’t just walk through it; have to go around it. That’s part of what world building does in a good story. It sets up some of the obstacles that the characters can’t just ignore, that they have to deal with as part of the challenges that they’re facing. I think that good world-building has a sense of history and weight to it. It’s not just like, all this stuff got here yesterday. It’s more like there’s been layers of history and layers of stuff that’s happened over generations and over centuries that’s all still kind of hanging around. And so the more layers of the past there are in the world, the more the world feels real and lived in. And I think that’s what we always want. You know, when I did All the Birds in the Sky I kind of cheated because the final two-thirds of the book mostly take place in San Francisco which is a place that I live in and have lived in for a long time, so it was like, ok there’s all these little details that I know from living here and I can just call upon that. And you can’t do that unfortunately with a fictional place. You have to just really, really dig deep and invent a bunch of stuff that has that level of “You can touch it, you can taste it, you can smell it, you can feel it,” and it’s tricky; it’s really hard.


CSA So, in terms of process when you’re actually writing, Is this...do you have the world fully fleshed-out in your head and you’re putting it down as you’re writing everything else, or is it more like there are seeds that you realize you’re going to have to plant and they end up in later drafts? 


CJA It’s always different. Every process is different, and in the case of The City In the Middle of the Night, I spent, I don't know, a year and a half writing long-hand in blank journals; and that’s what I did with All the Birds In the Sky and some of my previous novels too, but with this one, I ended up not really being able to use what was in most of those journals. It was kind of frustrating. I kept trying a bunch of different approaches, but what did happen over the course of that time of just like putting down stuff and putting down stuff and putting down stuff, and like, trying different approaches to the story, was that I came up with a bunch of stuff for that world. ANd so, by the time I figured out an approach to the story that worked, I had already written down hundreds of pages of details about the world that ended up being useful. But, pretty much always, no matter what you’re going to have to go back and add more of that stuff in as you revise. I don’t like to spend a lot of time coming up with stuff that ends up not really being used in the story if I can avoid it. I like to come up with locations that we’re going to spend a lot of time in. Like I think of it almost like, you  know if you watch a classic sitcom, there are like 3 or 4 sets where the characters hang out a lot. Like, for example, my parents were watching a lot of Frasier recently so I sort of watch it with them. And with Frasier you know, there’s Frasier’s apartment, there’s the radio station where he works, there’s the cafe where he and Niles hang out—those are the three kind of big sets that they have that are permanent sets. Most TV shows have that; they have a few sets that you just see a lot of, that a lot of work has gone in to them because they are the main places that the characters spend a lot of time. And I think that a good novel often has that too, to the extent that the places where the characters spend the most time are places that we really get to kind of feel like we know those places well and we want to hang out at them. When you think about your favorite novel often, there is a place where the characters hang out a lot that’s like, “oh, I want to hang out there”, and there’s a place where they kind of do the tasks that they need to do, or there’s like, there’s certain locations. And I feel like those places need to be really fleshed out, and you kind of know them as you’re writing, and then everything else like walking around out on the street, you just have to have a sense of what it’s like walking around. I try to think of it almost like building sets in my head, like there are certain sets that I need to build, and I figure out what those are and I really try to make those sets as detailed and sturdy as I can.


CSA You mentioned that you work in journals; or that you worked in journals for this book and you worked in journals for All the Birds In the Sky ; how does that effect your writing? 


CJA The advantage of writing longhand is, first of all, it’s harder to go back and revise as you’re writing. It’s harder to second-guess what you already put down. There’s no little icon that pops up in the top corner of the blank notebook that says you’ve got a new piece of email, or someone’s tweeted about you, or someone’s texted you. It’s harder to get distracted, hopefully. And also I just find I can be a little bit more stream of consciousness; I can be a little bit more just kind of writing very raw stuff. It feels almost like keeping a journal in the sense that I’m just writing about stuff that I’m feeling or that the characters are feeling. It just kind of has a little bit more immediacy in a weird way.


CSA I think now’s a good time for us to turn to the novel under question, The City in the Middle of the Night. Before we get too far into that, could you describe it for our listeners?

CJA Yah, so basically The City in the Middle of the Night takes place on a planet that is tidally locked, which means that there’s a permanent day side, and there’s a permanent night side, and in my novel at least, the day side is really, really hot, and the night side is super cold, and people basically live on this thin strip of twilight in between the day side and the night side. I was just really attracted and fascinated by that idea of living between these two extremes of really hot and really cold. I always love stories of people caught between extremes or in the middle of dichotomies or whatever. That’s a thing that I keep returning to. And so, basically these characters are living in a city that is on the edge of the night. This one character Sophie, her best friend Bianca gets her involved with these revolutionaries and they kind of get in to some trouble. Bianca does something a little bit wreckless, and Sophie decides to take the blame for Bianca, which leads to Sophie getting banished in to the night, basically sent in to the frozen wasteland in permanent darkness where she’s going to die. But instead of dying, she actually learns how to communicate with the creatures that live there in the night, and kind of forms a bond with them. When she comes back to the twilight area where the humans live, she’s changed and she has a different perspective. She kind of wants to save her friend Bianca, but she also is trying to just figure out what it means and how to help these creatures who live in the night because they want her help.


CSA Where did the idea for this book come from, and how did it change shape as you took on the task of actually writing it?


CJA The idea came from reading about tidally locked planets. I was working on io9 which had a lot of Science mixed in with the Science Fiction, so we had a bunch of tidally locked planets that i helped to edit in some cases. I just was reading about it a lot, talking about it a lot, talking to science nerds about it. In real life, the majority of the planets (don’t quote me on this), I think the majority of the planets in the habitable zone of their stars are tidally locked, and it’s partly because three-quarters of the stars in our galaxy are tired dwarfs and in order to be close enough to a red dwarf to have enough heat to be in the habitable zone, you have to be tidally locked because of the gravity, because you’re so close to get pulled into a tidally locked situation. So, basically, if we were to colonize another planet outside our solar system, there is a high probability that it will be tidally locked, so could actually be our future. I got fascinated with that and just started trying to imagine what that would be like, what it would be like to learn to communicate with the creatures that live in the darkness. That was kind of where it started for me. ANd then the ore I thought about it, the more I got fascinated by the fact that on a tidally locked planet, you wouldn’t have the same awareness of the passage of time because the sun doesn’t rise, the sun doesn’t set, the sky basically never changes. LIke, there probably wouldn't be seasons. The sky might just never change. It might just be always the same, and so when do you sleep? When do you know when to work? When do you eat? You know, without the natural circadian rhythm that we have on earth. And so I came up with this idea that some of the people living on the planet try really, really hard to maintain the circadian rhythms that humans had on earth by using curfews and enclosing themselves in total darkness half of the time, and all of these other things that they do, and that leads to a really conformist society. But then people living in this other city decide to just do whatever they feel like whenever they feel like and kind of lie in harmony with the planet which means just not really having any sense of the passage of time. And that theme of the the passage of time, and how do you know that time is passing other than people are slowly getting older and certain biological processes will continue probably on a schedule, how do you deal with not knowing the passage of time just by looking up at the sky? And that sort of led me to thinking about how we think about the past, and how we think about the distant past versus the recent past. ANd it kind of gets back to what I said before about world-building, because a lot of what makes world-building work is the awareness of history and the past and stuff that happened before you came along. That became a big part of the book is thinking about the passage of time and relating it to things that light does in different ways, Andthe kind of ways that light acts and how light that never changes it’s position might seem to people.


CSAIt’s sort of interesting that you were mentioning extremes when you were talking about the tidally locked planet, because that’s what you described in terms of the way the two cities deal with time is also sort of two extremes.


CJA I love dichotomies. I mean like,  All the Birds In the Sky is about that kind of dichotomy between two opposites or two extremes as well: Magic & Science. I think that’s a thing that I’m just always interested in. I like to have these kinds of oppositions or dichotomies and play around with them.


CSA So I want to talk to you now about metaphor because there’s a lot of different metaphorical layers—well, literal layers of metaphors in The City in the Middle of the Night. What do you see as the central metaphors of the novel, and how do you approach metaphor when you’re writing?


CJA Wow, I mean, obviously in Science Fiction and fantasy you have things that are kind of metaphorical but they’r actually real in the story and you have to be careful with that. For example, colonizing another planet inevitably brings up issues of real life colonialism here on Earth, and there’s no way to avoid that because it’s the same process, it’s just on a different planet instead of a different land mass or country. In some ways, colonization of another planet is a metaphor for colonialism on earth, but it’s also real. It’s also real in the story and people get understandably annoyed when you try to push those metaphors too far in terms of using them to comment on real life stuff in a heavy-handed way. For example, not to pick on original Star Trek, but the way that original Star Trek sometimes have these metaphors for racism or the vietnam war; like they had that one episode where there’s the people who are white on one side and black on the other, and the other people who are black on one side and white on the other, and like, it’s a metaphor for racism but it gets really heavy-handed and really kind of, it feels like you’re lecturing the audience a little bit. It’s a little bit sledge-hammery and you don’t want that, but at the same time these things are kind of obviously related. They do relate back to real life stuff and they are inevitably connected to real life stuff. You just have to kind of think about A. make sure that it’s real and it’s on it’s own terms, and it’s not just a metaphor, and B. Try to be kind of sensitive and nuanced about it, and not hit people over the head. And that was something I worried a lot about in this book, in general. But also I think that I like metaphors that are meaningful to the characters. I think that kind of comes back to the thing that if things are real to the character, that feels meaningful to me. If the characters are consciously creating metaphors that are meaningful to them, that is better than me creating a metaphor that I’m going to impose from the outside, if that makes any sense.


 CSA This is Story Behind the Story on KSQD 90.7 FM. Stay tuned for more of my conversation with San Francisco author Charlie Jane Anders after a short break. 


{BREAK}


CSA This is Story Behind the Story for KSQD 90.7 FM Santa Cruz. I’m your host  Clara Sherley-Appel and I’m talking today to author Charlie Jane Anders, whose new novel, The City in the Middle of the Night, has led many critics to compare her to the queen of Science Fiction herself, Ursula K. Le Guin.
You were mentioning Le Guin earlier and I think what you’re saying about metaphor sounds very much like how metaphor operates in a lot of her novels. An this book has garnered more than a few comparison’s to Le Guin.


CJA I know, it’s a little intimidating. I mean, I was definitely thinking about Le Guin when I was working on it and it was definitely, she was still alive until, after I had already pretty much finished it when she passed away. I was very conscious of the debt that I owe in all of my writing but especially in this book to Le Guin, and to Octavia Butler, and to just a ton of other amazing writers. This book definitely owes a huge debt to Le Guin. Everybody always says “steal from the best,” and I think that there’s nobody better that you can steal from really.


CSA (laughs)  I mean, you’ll have to pry my copy of the Dispossessed out of my cold dead fingers


CJA Same, same.


CSA That said though, I can’t imagine Le Guin writing this book and part of that is taht so much of her writing and so much of what makes her effective and so much of the way that she brings metaphor in to her books involves a certain distance from a character’s emotional state in a way that like, you are so close to especially Sophie in this book.


CJA Wow, thank you. I mean yah, I hope that this doesn’t just come across as just like a () version of Le Guin. I don’t think it does.


CSA No


CJA I think it’s hopefully it borrows from Le Guin but has it’s own thing going on. Yah, I was just literally reading a thing the other day where Gary Wall, who is this science fiction critic who is brilliant and awesome, was saying that people who invite comparisons to Le Guin always end up losing out, which I think is fair. You’re not gonna, you can never be—I can never be as brilliant as Le Guin. This is a little bit of a humble brag but I was actually asked to write an afterword to a new edition of the Left Hand of Darkness; they’re doing a 50th anniversary edition and for some reason they thought it would be a good idea to get me to write a companion piece to it. So I was re-reading the Left Hand of Darkenss and it’s just so dense with ideas and beautiful moments and incredible imagery and just so much stuff going on in that book that every time I read it, it’s a new book. It’s just amazing. Yah, I mean that I think that the stuff about Sophie’s emotional state— it kind of comes back to like I was talking about the thing of like the sky never changes, the sun never sets, the sun never rises; it made me think about the passage of time, and that mad eme think about the past, and thinking about the past made me think about trauma. I think that a huge theme in this book is trauma, both personal and historical. And so, part of what ended up being interesting about Sophie is she’s dealing with a lot of personal trauma due to the stuff that happens to her at the start of the book, she goes through a lot over the course of the book and I wanted to kind of honor that. But also she’s kind of coming to terms with the fact that there’s historical trauma that she kind of is affected by but didn’t really understand. That is a thing I wanted to handle as carefully as I could. And I spent a lot of time talking to people about trauma and how they deal with trauma and how they process trauma, because I wanted that to feel lived in and as real as all the other stuff that I tried to make feel grounded. But I feel like that is a theme.


CSA So I think like now is a good time to have you read a passage from City In the Middle of the Night


CJA I’m going to read a little bit from the beginning and I mentioned that Sophie gets banished into the night because she takes the blame for her friend Bianca’s reckless behavior, and then she almost dies but she actually encounters the native lifeform that lives in the night that the human settlers call “Crocodiles” even though they don’t actually look anything like a crocodile. It’s kind of one of the weird things in this book is that we use earth terms for things that are not at all like the things on earth. And so she encounters this alien lifeform, and this is kind of the part of the book where instead of dying, she learns how to communicate with her.
“Back in Grammer School, they taught us all about the crocodiles, and what to do if you ever meet one. 
Don't try to run, because you're on there territory, and they can ensnare you in one of those long tentacles before your first stride. Plus, they can clear vast distances with their powerful hind legs, each one of the size of an adult human. And their strong forelegs can climb any surface and dig through almost any barrier. 
You might be able to hide, because we don't know how they sense their prey, since they can't rely on vision or hearing in this pitch dark wind. They may use scent, or maybe they can detect motion somehow. Nobody's ever hidden from one, but you might be the first. 
The only viable strategy though is to attack. Crocodiles do have a few weaknesses that a human can exploit. They have soft spots on the underbelly, where the carapace doesn't extend all the way around. I know where all their major organs are, because I watched Frank the butcher carve one up for some fancy banquet after a few hunters had gotten lucky returning from the night in one piece with fresh game. 
But their main weakness, the easiest one to reach, is the exact center of the pincer that's right in front of me, sticking out of the creature's head. The impenetrable shell contains two knife-sharp claws, but at their midpoint is a forest of a hundred wriggling tongues, each one about the size of your little finger. If you manage to strike at the pincers heart, and hit one of those slimy appendages, then you might kill it in one stroke. 
That pincer is so close I can feel one of its edges scrape my throat. It could slice my head off before I could react. I try to summon all my courage, brace my feet on the slippery ground to deliver one great blow to the warm spot of the pincer’s fulcrum. I can do this. I'm strong enough. I raise both fists.
Then I stop. 
Because I feel warm breath coming from below the pincer, where the creature's mouth is. And that part of me that always stands back and pulls everything apart, instead of just blurting out words, is asking: why is a crocodile's mouth so far away from all these tongues, anyway? She can't possibly use them to taste anything or make any sounds. Why are they right at the center of this armored scissor, vulnerable yet shielded? 
I lower my fists. Instead I push my unprotected face forward, almost losing my balance in the dark. The pincer is all around my head and neck now, but it doesn't close and kill me. Instead, this crocodile lets me press forward and push my frostburnt nose into the moist heat of her slimy warm grubs. They brush my face and my head loads with urgent smells and disorienting sounds, a beautiful ugliness, too much to handle, Like I'm out of my head drunk with no up or down, nothing but a whirl of sensory overlord.
I almost keel over but somehow I stay upright until—
I'm somewhere else. I'm way out in the middle of the night now, surrounded by huge sheets of ice on all sides. A mountain of ice and snow sidles past, along the horizon. We’re thousands of kilometers farther out than any human has gone in 25 generations, since we lost all our scoutships and all terrain vehicles. 
Somehow I can see in the dark now, except that I realize I'm not seeing at all. I'm using alien senses, and my mind is turning them into sight and sound. 
I tear through the landscape so fast the wind can't keep up. A sudden storm could rip me apart, the tundra could swallow me, but I don't care. My back legs push against the ground and the ice surrenders while my smaller front legs rip into the slick surface, propelling me even faster and keeping my balance. I'm not running—This is something much better. I’ve never felt so much power in my body, and so many sensations flood into the ends of my two great tentacles as they taste the wind around me. 
I want to laugh, and then I turn and see that four other crocodiles are running alongside me, grasping some spiky devices in their tentacles and pulling a sled full of some kind of precious metal. I feel a surge of pride, safety, happiness that they're with me and we're going home.
Then we reach it: a huge structure in the shape of a rose with all of its petals spread, a circle surrounded by elaborate criss-crossing arch shapes. Only the very top pokes above the surface, and the rest extends far below the ice, but still it's beauty almost stops my heart. A glimmering city, many times larger than Xiosphant, that human eyes have ever seen.”
And that's our first glimpse of the city of the middle of the night which is where the book gets inside all 


CSA This is Story Behind the Story on KSQD 90.7 FM. Stay tuned for more of my conversation with San Francisco author Charlie Jane Anders after a short break. 


{BREAK}


CSA You’re listening to Story Behind the Story on KSQD 90.7 FM Community Radio for Santa Cruz County. I’m Clara Sherley-Appel and I’m talking to Sceince Fiction and fantasy author Charlie Jane Anders about her latest novel The City In the Middle of the Night. 
What do you think it is about Sophie that lets her see these creatures for who they really are?


CJAI think it’s that she's not a typical hero of like a Science Fiction or fantasy book, and that was a thing that I really... like part of the many ways that I was trying to like break out of my usual pattern in this book was to make Sophie not the typical sci-fi or fantasy hero. She's not someone who acts first and then thinks later, she's not someone who talks a lot, she's not an extrovert. She's a total introvert. She's very shy, in fact. She is kind of somebody that hangs back and thinks about stuff, and she's you know constantly kind of second-guessing herself questioning and wondering. And I think that’s the thing that actually makes her open to communicating with this very different life form, because she's not just like wandering into the situation. She actually stops and thinks and that's what saves her life. And you know in that moment she is just willing to take this incredible risk and kind of make herself really vulnerable. That might have been terrible decision that might have gotten killed, but it actually pays off because she figures out that something about what she's been told about this creatures doesn't make sense. I think it’s just that she's different. That's part of what I love about so is that she's she's not like other heroes that I've written, and she's also kind of just a different kind of character.


CSA I think it's fascinating she is simultaneously someone who, especially early in the book, you can just tell she desperately wants to fit in, but she's also like almost pathologically incapable of conforming. 


CJA Yeah and I liked that about her and I thought that was interesting. The book originally starts with the thing where she's grabbed by the police and dragged away and that’s like how the book starts and it's like was an exciting start to the book, but it didn't really tell you who Sophie is and what she's about and her relationship with Bianca and why she's willing to to take the blame for Bianca's theft, and all this other stuff. And so I kind of made the decision to kind of start a little slower and hope that people have unfair with me for like 20 pages before we get to the action because I wanted to kind of establish her as a character. 


CSA So there’s a concept that you introduced later in the novel...anchor bender (?). Without giving too much away, tell us about that.


CJA You know they travel from the city that Sophie lives, in which is the city where everybody sleeps at the same time and everybody kind of works at the same time and everybody has like very clearly defined roles, and it's kind of conformist and very regimented. And eventually travel to the other city where there's kind of no rules and people do whatever they want but it's also very dangerous and kind of on the edge of falling apart and ruled by these families that are kind of gangsters almost. So I was trying to come up with like what I thought was a believable culture for this two cities, bearing in mind that they had been on this planet for hundreds of years, Earth time, and you know they had started out with cultures from Earth that were not the cultures that we’re used to either. So I just tried to come up with a bunch of cultural concepts in both cities that made sense to me and that were interesting and anchor banter (?) was something that of to kind of like with its own and got really fun. And I I liked the idea of like Sophie has to go to this other city and learn a new language, and part of learning a new language is that inevitably there are concepts in that language that don't translate into anything in in your original language. You know in English, we have like there are terms from German like Schadenfreude or whatever, or in terms of Japanese, that don't necessarily have an exact translation in English and it's more like it's a cultural concept that doesn't, you know, it doesn't have an exact analog. And obviously this is a thing that Le Guin played with a lot like her books; In the The Left Hand of Darkness, there's the concept of shift graphour (?), which is you know something that Genly Ai struggles to understand throughout the course of the book, and he that's part of Genly's journey in the book is learned to understand this concept in this alien culture. I wanted to have something like that that was kind of an interesting concept in (?) language that Sophie struggles to understand what it means. It kind of, you know, it became an interesting misdirect, because you think it's about one thing and then over of course the book you kind of realize is actually about something completely different. It actually becomes important to the relationship between Sophie and the other POV character in the book who's the smuggler named Mouth, who, Mouth is kind of in a lot of ways the opposite of Sophie. Mouth is a huge extrovert, totally a woman of action who is happy to weigh in and like kick butt and take names and worry about the consequences later. And like, has murdered a million people over the course of her life as a smuggler and is kind of a badass but has all this stuff from her past that she has dealt with properly. And so this concept of (Anchor Banter?) without giving away all of it, it ends up becoming something that helps you to understand the relationship that Sophie develops with Mouth. I talked about how I like it when I'm writing a book and I surprise myself or the characters surprise me or the story surprises me; This was something that kind of surprised me in a way. It just sort of... I wasn't entirely sure where I was going with that and then I was like, “oh, but what if…?” and it just kind of ended up being a thing that paid off in a way that I thought was really that made me really happy in terms of actually having a meaning for this relationship that ends up being central to the book in the end.


CSA Speaking of things that are really satisfying in the end, What were your favorite parts of the city of the middle of the night to write down?


CJA I love a lot of the stuff with Mouth and her friend Alyssa. You know, Mouth, she's a smuggler. She travels with this group of smugglers called “the Resourceful couriers”, and Alyssa is kind of Mouth’s partner, and they sleep together. They they literally sleep together: They share a sleeping bag or whatever because you have to do that for various reasons. They have a relationship that’s sort of ambiguously romantic; like they’re kind of married but they're kind of best friends.


CSA romantic friendship 


CJA They have a romantic friendship, and it's pretty clear that they're kind of in love with each other but they're kind of also just best friends. The moments of them kind of hanging out and being these two kind of cynical smugglers were some of my favorite parts of the book to write, and just like they're kind of joking back and forth and their kind of ...I think that the stuff with Mouth and Alyssa added some lightness to a book that was, in some places, a little bit dark and and scary. It kind of adds some lightness to it, and then over time as Mouth confronts her own darkness, that gets more complicated. But I think that there's always this nice kind of crackle of like joking around and cynical bantering between Mouth and Alyssa that I really, I really enjoyed writing that and that's the kind of stuff that I always enjoy writing. It's like, people who kind of have that relationship where they can joke around and they kind of understand each other.


CSA What do you want readers to feel when they read this book?


CJA I feel like if you start out with a feeling that you want the reader to have then you can get a little bit manipulative, but there are feelings that I get from this book. Like when I reread it or when I was revising it, I feel like by the end of the book I have a really helpful feeling, like I feel like it's a very helpful book. It's a book that confronts a lot of like, heavy stuff but it's also about coming together and finding a path forward and finding hope. And there are parts of the book that just... talking about favorite parts there's a part towards the end of the book (which I won't spoil because it's a huge spoiler but) where Mouth and Sophie really bond in a way that they haven't bonded before. They do this by kind of having this kind of communion that they've never done before. That's the part of the book where when I reread it I guess I feel overwhelmed I hope, but also just like this intense feeling of... I don't know, just, tenderness I guess. And so I guess I hope that people come away from the book with a sense that all of the stuff that we're grappling with in real life, we can find a way to deal with kind of. Part of what I like about science fiction is that you can confront a lot of heavy stuff that, if you wrote about it in a realistic novel, in a a quote unquote “realistic” novel, if you wrote about it in a non-fantasy / non-science fiction novel set in 2020 or 2019 or whatever, It would be, it might be really heavy and it might be really hard for people to deal with. But you can put it on another planet, and you can kind of a show a way forward through, you know, these kind of thought experiments, and you can kind of show how, actually we can cope with this, we can do with this., we can grapple with this. And a lot of the themes of the book...it’s not a book that particularly comments in a kind of one-to-one on the nose way about current politics in America or whatever, but there’s stuff that kind of relates back to political issues, and I think that the book, hopefully, leaves you feeling like “we can change, we can do this, we can come together, we can find a different way.” 


CSA You mentioned that writing this book sort of forced you to think about and maybe confront some trauma’s in your past. Was writing it healing?


CJA That's a good question. I mean, I think writing is always kind of a little bit cathartic. You know part of the process is that you create scary or intense or upseting situations, and you hopefully show the character surviving and escaping them and getting through them, and that can be really cathartic. It definitely helps me to think about stuff in a different way, like exploring that theme of the past and especially the connection between personal trauma and kind of like collecting historical trauma. That was a helpful kind of therapeutic-ish thing to think about during the time I was working on it. And I started working on it in kind of late so 2013 and early 2014, and so it was a very different time than now, but it was still that was a good thing to think about and it kind of was helpful in some ways. Like I this is provided me with some some metaphors that I hadn’t had before I guess.


CSA What's next for you?


CJA Well, so I have this young adult trilogy that I sold to the same publisher, Tor. I handed in the first book, and now I'm busy revising that while also working on the second book and trying to figure out what the third book is. Like I have a plan but it keeps changing, and you know I’ve basically never written Young Adult fiction before, even though some people feel like the first third of All the Birds in the Sky has some YA feel to it. But it's it's a new it's a different kind of writing; it's kind of a different genre for me, but that's another challenge I guess. And I'm having a lot of fun writing kind of. It's more fun and kind of action-packed and fantastical. It's a very different kind of book than either All the Birds in the Sky or The City in the Middle of the Night, which I think it good because, again, you want to keep challenging yourself and you want to keep doing something different. It's a space opera, so it’s like spaceships and aliens and ray guns and that kind of stuff. It's sort of Guardians of the Galaxy / Star Wars kind of stuff.


CSA Charlie Jane, thank you so much for joining me today.


CJA yay, thanks for having me! This was super fun. Thank you! 


CSA Charlie Anders is the author of All the Birds in the Sky, published in 2016, and The City in the Middle of the Night, which comes out this February, plus a boatload of other things. You can find her books at your local bookstore, online, and anywhere else books are sold. Next time, I’ll talk to dramatist Xago Juarez about documentary theater and his new play on the history of East Salinas. I hope you'll join us.