City of Endless Night: 100 Year Anniversary Annotated Edition

I’ll admit: I approached *City of Endless Night* expecting a quaint, dated curiosity—a relic from sci-fi’s early days. Instead, I got a gut-punch. Hastings’ Germany isn’t a distant dystopia; it’s a funhouse mirror held up to the fragility of democracy, and the annotations in this edition (read with understated gravitas by Boardman) make it clear just how much real-world horror Hastings anticipated. The narration is a masterclass in restraint—Boardman’s voice is smooth but never warm, his pacing deliberate, as if he’s reading a classified report on societal collapse. It’s the right choice for a book that’s more manifesto than novel, though I’ll confess the lack of vocal variation in dialogue-heavy sections occasionally makes it hard to distinguish characters. The story’s structure is its biggest stumbling block. Hastings jumps between philosophical treatises on power, vignettes of life under the regime, and abrupt shifts into what feels like proto-cyberpunk (there’s a scene involving mechanized propaganda that’ll give you chills). The pacing drags in the middle, where the plot gets lost in its own ideas, but the payoff—a climax that hinges on the banality of evil—is worth it. What lingers isn’t the sci-fi trappings (though the “lightless city” imagery is stunning) but the eerie specificity: the way Hastings nails the language of authoritarianism, the way faith and technology become tools of control. It’s not a perfect audiobook—some of the annotations feel overly academic, and Boardman’s delivery can verge on monotone—but it’s a necessary one. If you’ve ever rolled your eyes at dystopias for being *too* on-the-nose, this’ll humble you. Hastings wasn’t writing fiction. He was taking notes.