Cheap Half the Day Is Night (Book) (Maureen F. McHugh) Price

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Customer Reviews of Half the Day Is Night

How many ways can you spell B-O-R-I-N-G?
Apparently Maureen McHugh knows dozens for she manages to keep the reader on the edge of their seat. Not through anticipation of events but because they have fallen asleep and can't help but try to escape. It's the future and there are underwater cities and there are problems and crises. At least there are in the boring lives of the boring characters. Sorry, this is one for insomniacs.

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If Jerry Seinfeld wrote SF¿
Seinfeld's show was about "nothing". So was this book. The characters wandered aimlessly, and they weren't interesting to start with. The undersea world was well-realized, though. It's a good thing I got this from the library, or I'd have been very unhappy with it. I hope her next book is better.

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More life at the bottom
After China Mountain Zhang, I wondered whether McHugh could write anything quite as good. But she has. Again, in terms of physical action, nothing much happens, indeed this book is much more enclosed and claustrophobic than Zhang, not least because of its setting in an undersea city. But the real enclosure is not physical but economic and political; most people are unable to leave because they are too poor or somehow unable to obtain the necessary permits. Like CMZ this is a story about the people left behind in sci-fi's glorious visions of the future, and even though David Dai is in some ways much more of a traditional action hero than Zhang (he's a mercenary and bodyguard), his profession is not glamorous, and the heroic potential is further subverted by necessity which forces him into dangerous and tedious construction work. The politics of Half the Day is Night are more overt than CMZ, more immediately about the vast masses of poor and marginalised in our own world, but, hey, what's wrong with that? There are too few politically engaged fiction writers. Another very thoughtful and satisfying book.