Great cities are like any other living things, being born and maturing and wearying and dying in their turn.
Duh, right? Everyone who’s visited a real city feels that, one way or another. All those rural people who hate cities are afraid of something legit; cities really are different. They make a weight on the world, a tear in the fabric of reality, like….black holes, maybe. Yeah. (I go to museums sometimes. They’re cool inside, and Neil deGrasse Tyson is hot.) As more and more people come in and deposit their strangeness and leave and get replaced by others, the tear widens. Eventually it gets so deep that it forms a pocket, connected only by the thinnest thread of … something to … something. Whatever cities are made of.
(The City We Became, pp. 7-8)
There are places in the world where, if you were dropped in blindfolded and then allowed to unmask, you would know instantly where you were: Venice, London, New Orleans, San Francisco, Istanbul, Cairo...you get the picture. Oh, and New York.
That’s because there’s a certain identity to them, an air and a consciousness that permeates them. N.K. Jemison takes that conceit a step further: what if a city could develop a consciousness of self? What would it look like if it became alive?
Obviously, not alive in an Iron Giant sense of being, but in the sense that the city’s consciousness becomes embodied in one person, and that person will live as long as the city itself lives. In the case of New York, the city’s avatar is a nameless street artist with one pair of jeans and a passion to sing and paint. And he’s mentored by another man who is São Paulo (yes, the city of São Paulo because it’s the duty of every city to help birth the next one as it comes to consciousness). But São Paulo has very little power outside of his own city, his role is strictly advisory, and there are powerful forces waiting to destroy New York even as it comes alive. (No spoilers yet.)
Because New York is vast and varied, although the avatar embodies the whole, he also has five other avatars to assist him: the boroughs. Each avatar is the embodiment of their own borough, strongest when on home ground, and possessed of varied defenses and abilities. (Still no spoilers.)
They need those defenses and abilities because the New York is under attack by an enemy that manifests in both supernatural and real-world forms, and it’s an enemy that wants to destroy them, the city’s avatar, and the newborn city itself.
And somewhere between the third floor and the fourth, where Padmini lives in Aishwarya’s place, Manny gets it. This is just one building amid thousands in Jackson Heights — but here, in this four-story walk-up, is a microcosm of Queens itself. People, cultures, moving in and forming communities and moving on, endlessly. In such a place, nurtured by the presence and care of its avatar, the borough’s power has permeated every board and cinder block of the building, making it stronger and safer even as the city as a whole totters, weakened, against its enemy’s onslaught.
It makes Manny ache, suddenly, to feel the same wholeness all over the city. Shouldn’t everyone here have this? He’s been here only a day, and already he’s met so many vividly interesting people, seen so much beautiful strangeness. He wants to protect a city that produces such experiences. He wants to help it grow stronger. He wants to stand at its side, and be true.
(p. 194)
The City We Became operates on two levels (naturally — it’s fantasy, what did you expect?). You can read it as fast-paced fun with snappy dialogue and pure invention to delight. Or you can read beneath the surface for a critique of the forces that seek to destroy the place-ness of a place like New York: the chain stores and Starbucks, the gentrifiers: in short, all the forces of homogenization that seek to make every city look like every other city and all of them devoid of community, flair, and unique voice. It’s also a hard look at racist white New York and the politics of exclusion, a community of heroes who hail from the street and are at their best when they’re just being who they are, unselfconsciously New Yorkers. When the forces of evil coalesce and launch an attack on Queens, the Bronx and Hong Kong, who’s along for the ride, they take the shape of Starbucks that turn into monsters:
And two blocks farther down, Bronca can see another building, this one vaning colossal white porcupine spikes as it readies itself to pounce.
(p. 382)
In order to run the Gauntlet of Second Avenue and all the waiting Starbucks monsters, Bronca makes a decision:
“What are you going to — “ Queens begins.
“I’m gonna drive like a motherfucking New Yorker, is what I’m going to do,” Bronca snarls. And then she cuts off a truck and accelerates to fifty.
Queens cries out, and Bronca hears her scrambling for the seat belt that she should’ve already had on. The truck blats an air horn at Bronca. “Honking’s illegal! You’re gonna get a ticket!” she shouts — but she’s grinning, in spite of herself. It’s been a shitty few days. So at full speed she rockets down Second Avenue, cutting neat zigzags across the traffic, threading the needle between two Land Rovers, shooting through an intersection just as its light turns red. Hong curses Cantonese behind her. A right-lane car pass. An impatient swerve around a slow-moving pedestrian. There’s a police speed monitor on one side of the road down by Twenty-third, reminding drivers that the speed limit in the city is twenty-five, and it blinks a baleful red seventy as she blasts past.
(p. 384)
Indeed, although our five varied protagonists are powerful even if they don’t really know what they’re doing, their enemy is cunning and has been waiting for a long time, and can bring pressures to bear that they can’t withstand their own. It takes a city to save a city, and some of the most emotionally satisfying and resonant events come when average New Yorkers step up, just being decent, and kind, and fair.
The enemy that the avatars are facing is one that’s familiar to fantasy and horror readers, drawn straight from H. P. Lovecraft and imbued with his xenophobia, racism, and hatred of New York (when you pick up a copy of the novel, tilt the cover art in your hand to see the tentacles rising out of the East River.) It’s part-quantum physics and part old-school horror — that is, if Lovecraftian horror had a Roth IRA and an investment portfolio. Walt Whitman, who loved the city, is a guiding spirit, and there’s also a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shoutout to Charles Dickens, who was also fond of, and beloved by, New York. Jemison has chosen her literary forebears wisely.
In old school fantasy, everything would work out neatly, but this is not old school. It’s also the first volume in The Great Cities Trilogy. It’s as different as it can be from the Broken Earth Trilogy, but no less compelling for its immediacy and its two feet planted deep into the pavement of Old New York. Only a New Yorker could have written The City We Became. I can’t wait to see what the city does next.
Jemison, N. K. The City We Became (New York: Orbit Books, 2020).