But ever since New York became the newest and loudest member of an international resistance against the encroachment of hostile quantum possibility collapse, we been dealing with more than the usual day-to-day fuckshit.
New York’s battle against the Enemy trying to kill living cities ended in an uncomfortable stalemate in N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became, but things aren’t all bad. Yes, Staten Island betrayed the other boroughs to join with the Enemy (otherwise known as The Woman In White), but the balance was restored at the last second when Jersey City was welcomed in as New York’s newest borough. (I do wonder what New Yorkers think of this idea. I wonder what New Jersey thinks of it too.)
The avatars of Jersey City, Manhattan, Queens, Bronx, and Brooklyn have now gotten themselves a nice condo in Harlem. There’s room for anyone who wants to stay, along with the main avatar of the city itself, NYC (henceforth pronounced “Neek”), and everyone’s slowly becoming comfortable with their new roles as living embodiments of the Greatest City In The World.
However.
The white-tentacled, Lovecraftian city that is also the Enemy is still hovering over Staten Island. The plan to destroy New York is still on, and the Enemy has uglier weapons at its disposal than white tentacles. A lot uglier.
Make New York Great Again.
Parts of this book are very uncomfortable, since they’re an unflinching look at how badly people can be treated when they’re not the party (or race)(or economic stratum) in power. But it also features what politics can be at its worst. You may think some of the tone here was inspired by actual events, but all of this was written before the last few years. N.K. Jemisin even said in the afterward that this sequel almost didn’t happen because “The real world moves faster than fiction.” I’m sure trying to come up with worst-case scenarios and then watching the news escalate beyond the scenarios must be disheartening.
The Enemy is using all of the nastiness we’ve gotten so familiar with: the rallies of angrily afraid people who’ve been given their latest target. The nonsensical conspiracy theories. The police brutalizing the vulnerable while conveniently ignoring everyday atrocities. Unpaid interns on student visas working like slaves right up until the corporation denies them a job, so sorry, enjoy your deportation! Properties being incorrectly labeled as “distressed”, seized from their rightful owners and resold, oops, our bad! (Do a search under “brownstone homes illegally foreclosed”; this is something that’s happening. A lot.) Most of all there’s the relentless “othering” of cities, spreading the myth that an entire area is nothing but crime and drugs and rape, until people who have never been to the city will pour money into the coffers of anyone who claims they can “take the city back”, when what they really mean is “get rid of all the (insert minority slur here).”
The Enemy doesn’t have to erase New York, only make the world forget what New York is. New York cannot remain New York if it loses its art, its diversity, its welcome of outsiders, its daring.
You’d think that Staten Island would be relatively better off, but Aislyn, the avatar of the island, is finding out that’s very much not the case. Aislyn is still an irritant in the story, so convinced that she needs to be protected from all the other boroughs even to the point of siding with an invading force that’s trying to kill New York. But she’s also the victim, both of the Enemy and also of an upbringing that left her vulnerable to anyone that promised to be “on her side”. It’s the kind of abusive relationship where both parties are deluded enough to think that love is involved somewhere.
Personal deficiencies aside, it doesn’t take Aislyn too long to realize that the political promises of the Woman In White’s pet mayoral candidate are bullshit, but also that the floating white city above Staten Island is gradually draining the life out of the island, turning the people into docile minions and replacing anything that makes it unique with franchise restaurants.
So what exactly are these pylons taking out of her island? She doesn’t know, but she has her suspicions, based on what she’s seen missing from her fellow islanders. Vitality. Individuality. Reality, even. Those quintessential to making Staten Island the weird and wonderful place Aislyn’s loved all her life.
And that’s really the point, isn’t it? It sounds so trite to say that people should embrace differences, but those differences become so much more important when you realize that all the most damaging political messaging is about making everything the same. Same art. Same religion. Same people. Don’t bother us with your foreign cultures, your variations on sexuality, your insistence on not worshiping what we think is important. The Enemy’s drive to wipe out new cities (“new” meaning “since the start of this universe”) pretty much mimics the conservative rallying cry of Everything Was Fine Before YOU PEOPLE Came Here.
“Your species is the quantum equivalent of cancer – cancer that thinks and talks and fights back, and feels insulted when you call it what it is.”
My constant attempts to identify themes and figure out just what the author meant shouldn’t get in the way of the fact that this is a wild book, an earthy, urban-magic entertaining book that has everything I loved from the first novel, and then gives us more. N.K. Jemisin immerses us in the sights and sounds and even the smells of life in New York as each of the human avatars learn what it means to have almost godlike powers over (and from) their boroughs. And at the same time it’s all grounded in the fact that these are real human beings with their own lives and families and ways of reacting when they have to put up with each other’s habits.
Well fine, but can the living embodiment of the City put the fucking cap back on the fucking toothpaste now and again? Honestly.
All of the ways the avatars use to travel, or create, or defend themselves is a combination of their own human talents and the essence of their boroughs: flowing from one part of the city to another by riding the momentum of subway to e-bike to tired delivery driver. Turning a vape pen into a flame-thrower of Jersey pollution, or a kitschy snowglobe into an icy grenade. Brooklyn gets several moments to absolutely shine as a bad-ass former music celeb-turned-mother-turned-mayoral candidate as she fights off invaders with furious music and the bad part of the neighborhood. (“Mic check, mic check,” she snarls. “One-two, one-two. Drop.“) Even an argument when you’re trying to get your pissed-off friend to chill the hell out is conveyed in the language of cities.
He glances at her and there is a flicker of sleek glass skyscrapers, saber-sharp – to which she responds by spamming him with a thousand Queens-specific sensations: The smell of fresh-cut grass and barbecue grills, children swimming in backyard pools, parking your car in a driveway.
Jemisin expands the world she’s created by letting us see much more of the other living cities. It turns out there are many, many people out there who know the process by which cities are born, even to the point of knowing who the next city avatar will eventually be. But there are also a host of older cities who don’t want to have anything to do with New York’s war with the Enemy, partly because, ew, Americans, but also because there’s a high rate of infant mortality when it comes to cities. A lot of them would simply rather avoid the heartbreak and let NYC deal with it. Or not.
Padmini, avatar of Queens and Math Queen of the Universe, soon figures out that the flashes she keeps seeing of the fractal tree that represents their place in the universe, (along with an uncomfortable sensation of falling) means no one in the world can afford to ignore the problem.
“Hey. Guys? Uh, we’re all going to die. Thought you should know.”
I have to admit I’m a little bit disappointed that N.K. Jemisin has decided to keep this a duology instead of a trilogy, because it feels like there’s an endless amount of ways to play with this concept. Whether it’s the weapons that a pack of living cities use in hand-to-hand combat, or the Lovecraftan image of the White City “walking” its tentacles across the harbor while weaponizing Staten Island’s NIMBY and hatred of taxes. Every city has its own history and personality, and I want to see more of that, more of Paris being a bitch, Amsterdam’s reasons for being such a jerk to NYC, how much Istanbul cares for his cats (I’ll give this to you for free, nothing bad happens to the cats), or more details about how London’s very understandable mental problems manifest (although she probably needs to be careful about the colonialism jokes. Too soon.)
Most of all I love how satisfying the images are, both the big ones like entire cities charging into battle like kaiju (so silly and over the top, but it works), and the tiny moments where family members and total strangers reach out to a fellow New Yorker with a “honey, are you okay?” And I’m not sure if this is exactly what Jemisin was going for, but in the midst of the racism and intolerance and manipulative politicians we’ve got going on, there’s this weird angry hope that something good that will come out of all this endless hatred and rage. Not in spite of it, but BECAUSE of it.