Half the Day Is Night [Paperback]

Maureen F. McHugh (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1996

War veteran David Dai has come to ocean-bottom Caribe to work as bodyguard to Mayla Ling, banker and scion to the undersea city's old-money set. But as Mayla negotiates the biggest deal of her life, she draws the attention of terrorists who threaten to plunge her, and David, back into the nightmare of his violent past. HC: Tor.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

McHugh's first novel, China Mountain Zhang (1992), was one of the most highly praised SF debuts in years, impressive for its well-realized future world, solid yet idiosyncratic characters and surehanded handling of assorted narrative viewpoints. Her second novel shares many of these virtues, confirming its author as one of the most promising new voices in the field-and yet this book feels a bit flat. Set in Julia, one of the submerged cities of Caribe, the story centers on war veteran David Dai, who takes a job as bodyguard to one of Julia's high-powered bankers, Mayla Ling. Terrorists make several violent attempts to stop Ling's deal-in-progress; Dai saves his employer each time, but he is disturbed by memories of his years of combat, so he abruptly quits and tries to return to the surface. He is now suspect in the eyes of the Julia police, forcing him to hide out in the city's lower levels and await a chance to escape. Ling, meanwhile, decides to leave Julia, in Dai's company if she can find him. McHugh portrays the world of Caribe with a fine detail rare in science fiction, evoking a believable sense of life in the future. The intrigue never heats up enough to produce much suspense, though, and neither Dai nor Ling is interesting enough to carry the book alone.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Hired as a bodyguard for Mayla Ling, a banker in the underwater city of Caribe, war veteran David Dai finds himself embroiled in a treacherous web of corporate and political intrigue as both he and his employer become targets for arrest and assassination. The author of China Mountain Zhang (Tor Bks., 1992) accurately captures the claustrophobia of life in a sealed environment, where the internal stresses of daily life are mirrored by the literal pressure of living beneath tons of deadly ocean waters. This fast-paced sf adventure would be a welcome addition to most libraries.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 244 pages
• Publisher: Forge (January 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0812524101
• ISBN-13: 978-0812524109
• Product Dimensions: 6.7 x 4.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #230,368 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Maureen F. McHugh has spent most of her life in Ohio, but has lived in New York City and, for a year, in Shijiazhuang, China. She is the author of four novels. Her first novel, China Mountain Zhang, won the Tiptree Award and her latest novel, Nekropolis, was a Book Sense 76 pick and a New York Times Editor's Choice. McHugh is working on two novels, BabyGoth and Coming of Age in America. BabyGoth is a mother-daughter story: the Ya-Ya Sisterhood meets Alcoholics Anonymous. Coming of Age in America is a near future coming of age story -- and a romance. Chloe is a trailer park girl at a nice college. Derek is a rejuvenated 72-year-old returning student. McHugh teaches writing at the John Carroll University in Cleveland and at the Imagination and Clarion workshops. She and her husband and two dogs used to live next to a dairy farm. Sometimes, in the summer, black and white Holsteins looked over the fence at them. Now she lives in Austin, Texas.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Another fine novel from Maureen McHugh., September 18, 1998

By 

Michael Bulger (Rochester, NY, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Half the Day Is Night (Paperback)

"Half the Day Is Night" is not a sequel to her first novel, "China Mountain Zhang," but it seems to take place in the same fully realized future world of the latter work. It is also written in the same matter-of-fact style, with the same day-in-the-life sort of plot, and the same depth of character. This is not a novel for someone interested in typical SF fare--space adventure, science detectives, epic trilogies, and the like. Although the future imagined here has clearly been carefully constructed, at no point does the narrator intrude upon the characters and the events that unfold to explain things. The effect is one of complete immersion in a different reality, but one that (in retrospect) can easily be extrapolated from our own. That, to me, is one definition of great science fiction. This, to me, is a great science fiction novel. Maureen McHugh is the sort of author who deserves a much wider audience; at the same time, she is the sort of author one knows will never command that audience, by the simple criterion that she writes fiction, not novelizations. I can't recommend this book more highly.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars More life at the bottom, January 21, 1999

By 

flying-monkey (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Half the Day Is Night (Paperback)

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.

2.0 out of 5 stars True, not much happens, January 10, 2011

By 

D. Grant (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Half the Day Is Night (Paperback)

McHugh started strong with China Mountain Zhang, and then..the ship hit the rocks and sank in the ocean off Haiti. Here the atmosphere is claustrophobic, since everyone lives in some undersea..something (since no one has a job, except security people, why are they there - oops, stage dressing). Mayla, a bank executive, is a prisoner of, well miles of seawater, and her own ditzyness, and an existence that is pointless and inexplicable, even to her (and she is rich). McHugh lards this effort with howlers to beat the band - an undersea city with a freeway where internal combustion cars drive to and fro - ever hear of electricity? Poor people in the hermetically sealed undersea existence grind in poverty, burning charcoal (from where?? undersea kelp forests??). And no one ever heard of birth control pills? and so so forth and so on. My favorite point was when the former mercenary enters the rich lady's house and looks out a vast window at---blackness and nothing, and wonders, "who would want a window on nothing?" Who would want to buy a book about it either?