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The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars H. P. Lovecraft Gets a Diversity Makeover N. K. Jemisin’s The City We Became (2020) begins as NY (“This wild, incredible, stupid-ass city”) wakes up, birthed as one of a small number of sentient cities in the world. It is a complicated birth, involving six human avatars, one for each of the five boroughs plus one “primary” for the city as a whole, and attracting an “enemy” and its “harbingers” from another universe, out to kill the infant city and or to subsume it by taking out the avatars before they can figure out what’s going on and unite as a composite, powerful, self-aware city. The avatars had been leading more or less normal lives as human beings (city politician, Art Center director, graduate student, homeless graffiti artist, etc.) before suddenly becoming able to switch back and forth between normal “real” human perception and abilities and the at first disorienting “surreal” city ones. This book is urban sf with an overt political thrust. Fitting the diverse nature of NY, its six avatars are a diverse group. Five are people of color (two African Americans, one Native American, and one Tamil and one multi-racial person), four are female, at least three are gay or lesbian, and one is a not an American citizen. In addition to the newly born multi-cultural NY, the two sentient cities featured in this story are South American (Sao Paolo) and Asian (Hong Kong) who manifest as gay “men.” The only one of the six NY avatars to be white and straight is also repulsive (though her controlling, racist policeman father is worse). The malignant multi-dimensional enemy from a universe inimical to ours, meanwhile, mostly manifests in NY as a series of white-clad white women like “philanthropic” businesswomen or obvious Karens while puppeteering numerous sympathetic and “synchronistic” white racist or xenophobic or homophobic or anti-feminist New Yorkers and proliferating a plague of white tendrils, tentacles, feathers, or flowers. Many of the threats to the avatars fantastically exaggerate the daily dangers people of color experience in any American city, like hostile police and suspicious passersby. I don’t want to complain about all this, because the majority of sf (and fantasy) has been written by, for, and about straight white people, and aggrieved and defensive white racism is toxic (“White dude whining as a growth industry”), but the diversity on steroids, including excrescent touches like the roommate of the avatar of Manhattan being a quickly introduced and forgotten trans Vietnamese from London, did start getting a little too much. The novel also affirms creative people, artists, musicians, or mathematicians (though the mathematics of the graduate student Tamil avatar are underused), while condemning city gentrification through the driving out of low-income residents, the replacement of unique local shops with generic chain satellites, and the like. The novel is a love song to NYC and to big cities in general and a plea for them to stay dirty, distinctive, and individual. The writing is vivid, funny, and fast paced, with the entire novel occurring over the course of a few intense days as the new avatars try to get it together while fending off smirking threats and insidious attacks from their enemy. There are no sex scenes. The violence mostly happens on a metaphysical plane and isn’t very graphic. There are some suspenseful scenes of sf horror, in which, for instance, white x-shaped spider things attack a pair of brownstones in Brooklyn, Starbucks chains start attacking a jeep, a toilet stall in the women’s restroom in the Bronx Art Center gets aggressive, and a subway car mutates into a monster. There are many f-words and other salty exclamations. Plenty of pop culture references, too. Most work fine, like, "She looks like an evil mid-career Joni Mitchell” or “a cross between a church lady and a female Colonel Sanders.” Some sound funny, like when the enemy manifests as the Woman in White outside a suburban Staten Island house and warns the NYC avatars, "You shall not pass!" but after initially chuckling at it, it struck me as childish, because why would the enemy want to or be able to imitate Gandalf facing the Balrog at that point? The enemy then says something like, “I’ve always wanted to say that,” but it sounds like Jemisin and not an inimical alien entity from another universe. And lines like “Now it’s just the two of them, living city and eldritch abomination, face to face and ready for the showdown to come,” so obviously playing with Lovecraft, make it difficult for me to care deeply about what’s going on in the story. The concept is intriguing: sentient cities transcending an unlimited number of alternate universes, the personalities of the human city avatars reflecting or embodying those of their cities, and so on. And Jemisin’s varied cast of characters mostly feel convincing. But as I read, I got the feeling that Jemisin hinted at and then summarized too much of the situation as she went, so I found that I knew what was happening before the characters did and then had to wait for them to catch up while getting ever more summaries of the situation to bring them up to speed, so I started thinking that the book could have been edited more tightly. And Jemisin fully indulges in the old overly talkative villain syndrome and in the old employ (or avoid) super abilities to do whatever the writer wants at any moment trick. The City We Became reads like a cross between Samuel R. Delaney (dirty, holy, gay, city street folks), China Mieville (monstrous, hybrid, animated city things), and especially H. P. Lovecraft (multidimensional inimical entity from another universe bringing its proliferating, “wrong,” and sea-reeking tentacles, tendrils, and towers to a city), with a strong dose of diversity and big city-love. I listened to the book read by Robin Miles, who throws herself body and soul into her reading, keeping the voices of the diverse characters distinct and consistent while ratcheting up the suspense. Listeners who prefer restrained readings of books might be turned off by Miles’ energy, but I enjoyed her. Will I go on to listen to the second book in the series? Hmmm. Not right now. View all my reviews
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