City of Endless Night
Author: Milo Hastings
Publisher: Wildside Press
ISBN-10: 0913960535
ISBN-13: 978-0913960530
Rating: 9/10
Since the end of the Second World War, there have been many alternate history novels examining what would have happened had the events of that conflict gone differently- If Hitler had gone through with Operation Sea Lion, or if Germany won the Kursk battle in 1943. Few novelists have been written about what life would have been like if Germany had nipped things in the bud in the first go round with the Allies in the 1910s. The late Milo Hastings is one of them, producing one of the most disturbing science fiction novels to come out of the interwar period, “City of Endless Night”.
Set two hundred years in the future, City of Endless Night is set in an alternate universe, where the Imperial German government not only survived WWI, it thrived. And by thrive, Hastings means ‘conquered a butt load of territory’. In retaliation, the ‘World State’ as it is known bombs Germany into submission in a succession of wars, eventually turning it into a North Korea-like state, with its capital, Berlin, encapsulated in a dome that blocks out all sunlight. Against this backdrop, a lone chemist-the narrator-smuggles himself into the city. What he discovers is an authoritarian society so cut off from the rest of the world that even the royalty themselves believes the government’s own propaganda.
Throughout the novel, Hastings does a good job of letting the reader see the world from the point of the view of the nameless narrator. We get to know the military officers, the grunts whose job it is to protect the country from the enemy, even the Free Women, who aren’t so much free as much as forced to breed for the health of the state (marriage is forbidden in Imperial Germany, save for the Royalty). The result is a dystopian look at a corporatist society that pays lip service to Teutonic efficiency than the welfare of their starving citizens.
It is exhaustive though, and despite the tantalizing plot, readers may not want to a tour de force to find out what happens to the hero. Then again, this is a serious novel. Hastings can be forgiven for being more about substance than style. Overall, “City of Endless Night” is a dramatic-and prescient-novel that gives pause.
John Winn - Staff Writer
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