I received a free digital copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I wasn’t enjoying it at the very beginning, but in the end I fell in love with this book.
The plot is really good and I liked the world building and the characters.

I received a free digital copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This book was amazing! I read it twice! I loved it. Great plot, Great Characters.

Thank you kindly to the author, the publisher, and NetGalley for this review copy.

I gave this book a good try but in the end, it just wasn't for me. I felt very distant from the characters and even though it started out super fast paced and exciting, I quickly lost interest. I needed something more to hook me into the story.

I love how this quote is on the cover of the book. It pretty much sums up the ongoing conflicts yet gives up none of the plot. The overall concept was both beautiful and terrifying to read and many things the author included heightened the sense of participation for the readers.

For an adventurous space romp, City Under the Stars certainly delivers the goods, but will it be enough to stand out and satisfy the most avid of sci-fi fan? Hmm, maybe. Or maybe not. The story definitely has a great premise going for it, and speaking as someone who loves a good space opera, the addition of alien intrigue and conspiracy is always a welcome element. I also enjoyed the action and the world-building. I liked how the authors took familiar ideas and built upon them rather than seek to reinvent the wheel.

Unfortunately, I lost this copy and can't read it. I'll rate it high due to that I feel like this can be a new favorite of mine.

City Under the Stars completes a journey undertaken by Gardner Dozois and Michael Swanwick 25 years ago, when they published the novella The City of God. Over two decades later, the two realized there was more to the story, and began the work of expanding it. Now, after Gardner Dozois' tragic passing, the story can be told in full.

God was in his Heaven—which was fifteen miles away, due east.

Far in Earth's future, in a post-utopian hell-hole, Hanson works ten solid back-breaking hours a day, shoveling endless mountains of coal, within sight of the iridescent wall that separates what’s left of humanity from their gods.

One day, after a tragedy of his own making, Hanson leaves the city, not knowing what he will do, or how he will survive in the wilderness without work. He finds himself drawn to the wall, to the elusive promise of God. And when the impossible happens, he steps through, into the city beyond.

The impossible was only the beginning."


I enjoyed this one very much! It was a bit hard to follow at points but very interesting!

I was first intrigued by the cover, but the synopsis didn’t sound like something I would enjoy but I still wanted to give it a chance. I am so glad that I stepped out of my comfort zone. I loved this sci fi, futuristic, dystopian novel! The writing was fantastic and the story had be thinking a lot about life as I was reading. City of Stars was really good and I highly recommend.

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.

RECOMMENDED

There was something about this book I didn't get, although it was well paced for me it got something I didn't understand, besides that I enjoyed it a little bit.

Ehhhhh, I can’t decide if reading the authors’ previous work “The City of God” would have helped or not.

City Under the Stars is an extremely setting-heavy dystopian novella about a man who flees after committing a murder and then becomes a prophet (?) after visiting The City of God. I honestly am not sure what was going on. It felt very familiar in tone, like it’s similar to Christopher Priest’s Inverted World or Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation in the familiar-yet-wildly-different-and-abstract-setting.

It wasn’t bad, but I didn’t particularly like it. Check it out if you’re a fan of the authors.

This book is about a man who commits a murder, runs away from his factory town, and tears down the walls to the City of God, igniting a civil war.

I think I enjoyed the setting and world-building more than I did the actual story. Hansen seemed to be pulled along by whatever the plot demanded of him. There was something interesting in here about legacy, value, and ownership, but because the characters didn't have much of an interior life aside from the pieces that needed the plot the happen, it didn't stick the landing as much as I would have liked. But there definitely is an audience for such stellar ambiance.

For something so short, I don't think it should have meandered so much.

"We are all of us insane...It's the Wall's fault. It's existence forces us to acknowledge that our reality is out of phase with our desires. But we cannot admit this. So, in denying it, we go mad. This is called cognitive dissonance."

One word. WEIRD.

This book is like a sci-fi Cast Away. Gloomy and dark, a man's monologue. Surprisingly emotional as such.

But this particular quote spoke to me, spoke to a deeper meaning. Something that's relevant in the real world. We don't have to have a wall that we can see, we have religion, science, things we cannot explain. This is enough to feel the way Hanson felt.

The writing was not overly technical as sometimes sci-fi can be. It was jarring at times, but I think that that was the intent, to be confusing during parts. I did feel that the lack of secondary characters detracted from the overall story. The little interaction Hanson had with other characters left me with an incomplete feeling, like his relationships with his fellow man would have made his decisions more meaningful. Perhaps more talk of or flashbacks to conversations with his deceased wife would have gave him a better connection to his world. I had trouble making that connection.

Overall a book that made me think.

Multiple award-winning science fiction writer and science fiction Hall of Fame inductee Gardner Dozois alongside fellow author Michael Swanwick present Dozois's last published work due to his tragic passing in 2018. City Under the Stars is a follow-up to novella The City of God and is a story fizzing with lush, beautiful prose and a dark and compulsive plot.

Carl Hanson, a working-class manual labourer, escapes his hometown on a whim due to the lack of prospects and an unpromising future with his supervisor trying all methods to get rid of him. Having just been made redundant from his strenuous work as a coal miner he travels to The City of God. The walls enveloping the city to his surprise open for him and once inside he discovers the city laden with uber-advanced technology and the absence of the city's fiendish alien rulers. He makes the rash decision to open the city's gates to all and sundry, giving people a utopia they had never experienced before, but he failed to ponder the possible repercussions or consequences of his seemingly altruistic actions. Thus begins a race against time to stop the technology falling into the wrong hands in a city that isn't what it initially appears...

This is a thoroughly enjoyable amalgamation of futuristic sci-fi and dystopian landscape with elements of both horror and fantasy added for good measure. It's a bleak and sinister work which follows Dozios's signature style but this time we are treated to a happier ending than most of his previous books in order to put a period at the end of what would've been added to further but for Dozois death. Long-time fans of Dozois and Swanwick will find much to appreciate here and those new to the prolific pair will likely be impressed by the sheer breadth and depth of the world-building, rich-imagined characters you really begin to care about and prose that's both engages and flows effortlessly. I also enjoyed starkness of the landscape and the exploration of socioeconomic issues which are executed with considerable aplomb. Many thanks to Tor for an ARC.

3 Stars

The City of Stars is a dystopian Sci-Fi novel set in a world in which the City of Gods closed themselves off from the rest of the world, leaving everything and everyone on the outside to ruin. In this, we follow Hason, who has been working in the coal mines, up until he is displaced by a younger, stronger worker. After Hansons fall we soon follow him on the run throughout this broken society and wilderness.

I enjoyed the writing style of this, it reminded me a lot of how the Windsinger trilogy is written. However, to be a shorter novel I did find at times the pacing to be lagging. The concept is interesting and well developed. As much as I wanted to give this a five-star rating for me it is a little too slow and rambling. It does have a very classic feeling overall in tone and nature. I would recommend if you are looking for a shorter Sci-Fi to pick up.

I wanted to like this book, I really tried. The opening chapter reminded me of the Soviet dystopian novels--or any of the classic dystopian novels, really--that I read in the past, of the desolate landscapes and lifestyles, how it was all about the work. Hanson working away, the same tasks day in and out, contemplating about the wall dividing his life from what was out there, about the passage of time and the young replacing the old in the workplace. There were some contemplative, quiet pieces in this novella that was really interesting.

Having said that, I couldn't really get into the story or the characters. Once Hanson left for the wilderness, just like his wanderings I wasn't sure where the story was going. As promising as the premise was, nothing stood out for me to keep going. I managed to finish the book but I'm still not entirely sure what I read.

This book was such a departure for me. Though I read fantasy as often as I can find it, science fiction is 50/50 for me; sometimes I love it and sometimes I hate it. I often find it too focused on the “technical” for me to enjoy. This book was not like that but it was still definitely not my usual fantasy. I have not read anything else by the authors and I couldn’t find a copy of the original short to read.

I was immediately drawn in by the summary: “God was in his Heaven - which was fifteen miles away, due east.” This may just be one of the best openers ever. The story was short and went along an interesting line until it departed rather dramatically from where I expected it to go. I enjoyed it nonetheless.

It felt a bit like an outline after a certain point; like it wasn’t fully fleshed out. There seemed to be more story that could be written. Hanson was wonderfully alive, but everyone else felt a bit half-drawn. After reading the afterword and learning that that is precisely what happened, because Dozois passed before the project, as it was intended, could be completed, I loved it a bit more.

The ending was everything I wanted it to be. I enjoyed this and would recommend it. Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC.

City Under the Stars by Gardner Dozois and Michael Swanwick | Aug 25, 2020 | Tor Books

Ican’t say enough about Gardner and Michael Swanwick’s collaboration on what will now be Gardner’s last published work. The prose that opens is amazing, and it turns out that it was the seed that lay fallow for years until Gardner asked Michael to work with him on it. A fine irony as it was Gardner who showed Michael how to get a story finished years before. My only complaint, and a bitter one, is that it’s a “short novel.” Or maybe a mid-sized novella, I’m not sure. The afterword by Michael answers all your questions about who did what and why and when and illuminates the life of one of the most luminary people in SF.

The story opens with Hanson, the ultimate blue-collar worker, shoveling coal mined by one of the last “utopia machines” and losing a race, with a younger man put on his shift to dislodge him by a supervisor with a grudge. Soon Hanson is on the run, hopping a train across the Hudson into the wilds and near the unapproachable City of the Gods, a vast structure surrounded by an impenetrable wall where humans separated themselves from the outside world long ago, leaving it to its own devices, and ultimate decay. There’s a 1930s feel to this story, from the hobo camp Hanson stumbles into to the tantalizing glimpses of gleaming machines of the future and the class struggle between honest working men and corrupt bosses, along with stark knowledge that the two are interchangeable depending on circumstance.

The novel was supposed to have three parts: Hanson’s flight to the city; his exile from it; and the reconnection between city and outside, but Gardner died before the third section could be written, so we’re left with a tantalizing glimpse of things to come. That actually works out pretty well, allowing the book to end on a promising note, though by no means an unrealistic one. There actually is a Deus ex Machina…but sometimes that’s the point of the thing.

There are a number of parallels between this and Arthur C. Clarke’s classic, The City and the Stars (1958), so the riff on that title probably isn’t a coincidence. In the afterword, Swanwick tells how he saw it on the manuscript in a dream, so it may not be intentionally intentional, but it’s intentional.

I was held by this fascinating story right from the start. Initially I was drawn in by Hanson and the life he endured, which had a very bleak dystopian feeling. As the world comes more into focus and you begin to understand the whys of things there is a shift and suddenly what I thought I understood was just superficial as walls comes down in so many ways. The science fiction elements come more int focus. The entire tone changes. This is where I was so utterly impressed. At the same time there was a lightening, there was also a deepening of a feeling that things were somehow darker as they grew lighter. From this point I felt myself wanting to ponder deeper meanings even as the story gripped tight thrusting me forward.

Highly recommend dystopian science fiction.

This was a great read, after a long time coming. Novellas don't always work well turned into novels, but this one does. Will definitely need to find more from Gardner Dozois and Michael Swanwick.

Mad Max goes religious in this sequel to 'The City of God.'

I did not read the original book and that may have impacted my perception of 'City Under the Stars' but this book was not for me. The main character, Hanson, didn't have any redeeming qualities for him to be a likable character. Granted, not every main character needs to be perfect, but I couldn't get over his roughness.

I also had a serious issue with the writing style. There were descriptions of moments that were completely unnecessary and took me out of the book several times. I did not need to know the intricate details of someone urinating in front of others.

The book overall did not capture my interest and felt like a cluster of various themes with no real direction of where it was going.