Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Nightside City | 1989 | Lawrence Watt-Evans | Buy |
| 2 | Realms of Light | 2010 | Lawrence Watt-Evans | Buy |
Nightside City is Lawrence Watt-Evans’s venture into science fiction noir. The first book, published in 1989, is set on a tidally locked planet where Nightside City exists in permanent darkness. But the planet’s rotation is slowly shifting, and the city is destined to be consumed by sunrise and the deadly heat that comes with it. Against this backdrop, private detective Carlisle Hsing takes on a case that pulls her into a web of real estate fraud and corporate conspiracy.
The novel combines hardboiled detective fiction with science fiction world-building. Hsing narrates in the classic first-person PI style, complete with wry observations and a healthy distrust of her clients. The setting is the real star, though: a city where property values are crashing because everyone knows the sun is coming, and where the remaining residents are either too poor to leave or too stubborn.
The sequel, Realms of Light, arrived more than twenty years later in 2010 and picks up Hsing’s story after the events of the first book. Watt-Evans has described Nightside City as his attempt to write a Philip Marlowe story in space, and the result is one of his most distinctive works.