Half the Day Is Night (Paperback)

by Maureen F. McHugh (Author)

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.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 244 pages
• Publisher: Forge (January 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0812524101
• ISBN-13: 978-0812524109
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 4.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,927,347 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 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)

"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

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.

4.0 out of 5 stars Some part of the world never change, May 15, 2005

By	Michael K. Smith (Gonzales, Louisiana) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

McHugh has a great knack for taking ordinary people in ordinary places, putting them in not extraordinarily stressful situations, and producing out of all that a really well-told, well-paced story with characters you care about. She did this very,very well in her first novel, _China Mountain Zhang,_ and she does it almost as well in this one, her second. She also doesn't make the mistake of stopping to explain when and where the story is set, explaining how history has created this particular future: She just does her narrative job and lets the reader figure it out, bit by bit. In this case, we're a couple of generations into the future, when an undersea colony built by the United States in the Caribbean has won its independence. But that was sixty years ago, and now Caribe is just another Third World Latin American dictatorship run by a president-for-life, with an upper class who are very rich and an underclass who are very poor. Jean-David Dai, a young French ex-soldier wounded in the South African wars, has come to try out for a security job looking after a bank officer named Mayla Ling, a naive member of the "haves" who has been targeted by a political underground. David's trying to escape his past and his nightmares, and he's not sure this job is the way to do it, but he agrees to give it a shot for six months. Then things get out of hand, naturally. Mayla's house is bombed, David disappears, the bank is sucked up by a neighboring conglomerate, and things become very uncomfortable. The setting is fascinating; think Colombia or Guatemala, but 250 meters under the seabed, with a police force that does things its own way and citizens who know better than to argue, where business is routinely done with bribes and kickbacks, where internal combustion buses operate in defiance of good sense -- this being a closed system where air has to be recycled and the lower levels of society never get enough oxygen. Mayla has never known anything different, and comparing her comfortable view of this world to David's reaction to the cold and the dark makes you really pay attention. A quiet, thoughtful, convincing novel.