A New York State of Mind: the City We Became, by NK Jemisin
They hit Second Avenue at Spanish Harlem. Working-class neighborhood, late on a weeknight; Bronca's unsurprised to see that the streets are mostly empty. Only the bodegas stand open, sentinels of The City That Never Sleeps And Occasionally Needs Milk At Two AM. Gentrification here has taken the form of endless coffee shops. For the last few blocks these have been indie places, proudly touting their locally roasted pour-overs, all with different decor and sign fronts. Then comes the proof that it's all over for the neighborhood's original character: they pass a Starbucks on the corner.
So last month, having read only four of the six Hugo-nominated novels, I gushed over Mary Robinette Kowal's The Relentless Moon. Now that I've read all six, I THINK Kowal is still my choice for the Hugo, but it's close. Oh boy, is it ever close.
I confess, I was not overly thrilled with NK Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy, and didn't rank any of the three volumes as my number one choice, although I do not fault her history-making three consecutive Hugos for it. I figure it's on me, and that the overwhelming number of my fellow geeky fans who voted for it saw something wonderful that I failed to appreciate.
I can admit that now, because The City We Became---holy shit. HOLY MOTHERFUCKNG SHIT THIS IS GLORIOUS! I'm a transplanted New Yorker, and Jemisin makes the neighborhoods I used to frequent come alive!
No...she LITERALLY makes them come alive! The premise is that six strangers (fated chosen ones, whatever) gain superpowers representing the five boroughs of New York City, plus one more for the unified entity of NYC itself, because into every generation a chosen city is BORN, with the power to fight The Ancient Evil that seeks to destroy cities with the horrible weapons of gentrification, conformity, bigotry, misogyny, and long white tentacles that burst from the ground. The Big Bad is reminiscent of those single-episode villains from Buffy the Vampire slayer, whose terror was rooted in the real-world monsters that threaten us today.
Seems to me, Hugo voters will have a hard time comparing Manny, Bronca and the others to Kowal's astronaut women. They are apples and citrus different in their excellence. My taste gives the prize to Kowal by a hair, but I'll give Jemisin a song by way of consolation prize:
Start singin' the blues
I'm changing today
I'm gonna be a part of it!
New York, New York
Those neighborhood views
The all-night cafe
And the graffiti art of it!
New York, New York
I'm gonna wake up as a city that's in a fix
And find I'm part of the team!
One of the Six!
Those racist tattoos
They rub the wrong way
Find a replacement part for it
In old New York
If we can get Hong Kong
To show us what went wrong
we'll save the day, New York, New York!
I'm gonna wake up
On the south shore of Spuyten Duyv...il
And go from Inwood Hill Park
Down FDR Drive
Make it by dark and we'll make it alive!
Those tunnels that ooze
No trouble at all
Upset the applecart of it
Beneath City Hall!
What they did in R'lyeh
They'll try in Sheepshead Bay!
It's up to us, New York, New York!
Total Eclipse of the Heart: Black Sun, by Rebecca Roanhorse
May you drown in shallow water.
May your song be never heard.
May you fall in love with a man.
May your mouth ever fill with salt.
---Teek curse
And finally, a book that is almost ,b>Dune-like in its exotic world-building, spiritual mystery, and intrigue plotting, which turns out to be another first volume of a series. There is a central city where a long-standing religious cult rules by terror over the land. The former leader of the cult shocked his followers by choosing as his successor a woman from a low-born caste, and the other members are plotting against her. There is a splinter cult, ruled by the first, that keeps its beliefs private, having learned that public practice results in massacre. Meanwhile, across the sea, a young Chosen One with a Destiny makes his way towards the city on a ship whose captain has secrets of her own.
I loved it, and look forward to the next volume. There is magic, training montages, spiritual searches for truth, betrayal, war, deadly perils, and plot twists. Everything a geek could want. Very high recommendations.
On reflection, here is my vote ranking the Hugo novels for the year. If your mileage varies, that's cool, too. Historically, my second choice usually wins, so Jemisin is in a good position to pick up her fourth award. However, if my last choice wins, I'm not complaining. They are ALL very, very good.
1. The Relentless Moon
2. The City We Became
3. Black Sun
4. Piranesi
5. Harrow the Ninth
6. network Effect
Perspectives: Rashomon, and Other Stories, by Ryungosuke Akutagawa
It did not take long for the crone, who had been lying there as if dead, to raise her naked body from among the corpses. Muttering and groaning, she crawled to the top of the stairway in the still-burning torchlight. Her short white hair hung forward from her head as she peered down toward the bottom of the gate. She saw only the cavernous blackness of night.
DID YOU KNOW??--Akutagawa's story "Rashomon" has nothing to do with the famous Kurasawa movie of the same name, that is shown to countless law students as an example of the unreliability of witness testimony. That movie was based on a different Akutagawa story, "In a Bamboo Grove".
There's also a reason most people outside Japan have only heard of the one story in which certain people concerned with a murder (including the ghost of the victim, brought to testify via seance) give conflicting versions of what happened. Most of the other stories--if you've already read Poe and enjoyed him only moderately, you've already read these, and will be disappointed. Same macabre atmosphere, same weird psychology, same plodding build-up to "big reveals" you saw coming a mile away.
On the other hand, it feels good to me, to go from having read "The Western Canon" through WWI into the modern era when the great books list includes great books of the world, instead of only from Europe. So there's that.
Scraps of Wisdom: The Collected Legal Papers of Oliver Wendell Holmes
I was walking homeward on Pennsylvania Avenue near the treasury, and as I looked beyond Sherman's statue to the west the sky was aflame with scarlet and crimson from the setting Sun. But, like the note of downfall in Wagner's opera, below the skyline there came from little globes the pallid discord of the electric lights. And I thought to myself, the Gotterdammerung will end, and from those globes clustered like evil eggs will come the new masters of the sky. It is like the time in which we live. But then I remembered the faith that I partly have expressed, faith in a universe not measured by our fears, a universe that has thought and more than thought inside of it, and as I gazed, after the sunset and above the electric lights there shone the stars.
This is not an enormous tome full of court opinions by a long-serving justice of the Supreme Court. It's a thin volume of law review articles, speeches made at alumni dinners, introductions to law textbooks, and so on. Most are fewer than ten pages; the works run the gamut from "sawdust without butter" to "entertaining turn of phrase here and there."
More than anything, I found Holmes politically depressing. Through his legal career (which ended in 1932, before Black, Douglas, Brennan and RBG took the bench), he was considered America's greatest, most innovative jurist, a foil to stodgy old conservatives. and yet...he's a stodgy old conservative. His writings are full of throwaway lines about how God has blessed the property owning classes with the wisdom to rule the working class, and how the masses have nothing to say worth paying heed to, and how communism posits a threat to the world, but not a serious one, since no one who counts can take it seriously. these are not the main topics of his addresses; he just tosses them out so that the wise, enlightened Harvard faculty, or whatever audience he spoke for, will understand that he's just like them. I'm disappointed. I had hoped one of America's legal heroes would be better than that. three generations of conservatives is enough.