City Under the Stars by Gardner Dozois and Michael Swanwick

Published by Tor.com on August 25, 2020

Gardner Dozois, one of the most respected editors and anthologists in the history of science fiction, died in 2018. Although primarily celebrated for his editorial talent, he wrote and co-authored some noteworthy fiction of his own, including two Nebula-winning short stories. At Dozois’ request and under his direction, his slightly younger friend, Michael Swanwick, took an unfinished manuscript that had languished for years and helped Dozois turn it into a novella called “The City of God.” The novella was published in 1995. Over the ensuing years, they talked about turning the deliberately open-ended story into a series of three novellas that would work as a novel, but the press of other business and Dozois’ eventual death intervened. As something of a tribute to Dozois, Swanwick skipped the other two novellas and transformed the original novella and some work that Dozois did on a second one into a short novel.

The theme of City Under the Stars is the corruptive nature of power. The story is set in a dystopian future. A formidable wall separates laborers who toil at production from a city they cannot enter. Nobody knows who lives in the city. Rumors tell of Utopians who built the devices that the laborers still use to mine coal. Pre-Utopian technology has broken down, leaving men like Hanson to do the back-breaking work of shoveling the coal into a hopper. Hanson once took pride in his ability to outwork everyone, but he knows he can no longer keep up the pace. If he cannot work, his future is bleak.

Hanson commits a crime and flees from the factory, only to be abandoned before he reaches his destination. He joins a group of outlaws and flees again from a law enforcement raid. Hanson is with a dying and seemingly insane man known as the Preacher when a mysterious event allows Hanson to enter the city while carrying the Preacher’s lifeless body. The Preacher is restored to life but hubris is his ruin.

Hanson, wanting nothing to do with this dangerous city and its forgotten tools of destruction, returns to the factory after taking down a section of the wall. He is taken into custody and tortured before political rulers take him back to the city, hoping he will unlock its secrets and help them attain sovereignty over all others.

The nature of the Utopians and the fate of the post-Utopians is deliberately ambiguous, but the novel’s message is not. When Hanson was a worker, perfectly decent co-workers who were elevated to positions of authority quickly became abusive and self-involved. “Kill all the bosses and the quiet guy who’d worked alongside you all his life and never once did anybody dirt would step forward to fill the vacancy and become a boss himself, and next thing you knew you were eating dust at his feet, right back where you’d always been.” Hansen knows that if political leaders master the power that the city offers, they will use it only for their own ends and everyone else will continue to suffer. Power risks authoritarian rule, a lesson Hanson has internalized and that guides the decisions he makes at the novel’s end.

Dozois' sense of prose style served him well as an editor. Swanwick captures that style throughout the novel. The prose is graceful without becoming untrue to the story’s working-class sensibility. In a time when authoritarianism seems to be a rising threat both worldwide and domestically, the novel’s message is timely. Despite its word count, City Under the Stars feels more like an extra-long novella than a novel — it has only one significant character and the story’s significant events occur in a compressed timeline — but City Under the Stars is both a must-read for Dozois fans and an entertaining selection for science fiction fans in general.

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