“City magic is liminal. It likes the hidden stories, the perceptual-conceptual shifts, the space between metaphor and reality.” – N.K. Jemisin, ‘The World We Make’
Hello from Baltimore! Or maybe hello from the past, as I’m pre-writing this. Baltimore is certainly a place I’ve felt city magic, ever since I was a little kid. If you’re at AWP, say hi if you see me. I have mild face blindness and social anxiety, so it’s possible I don’t see you, and even more likely that I do actually want to talk to you.
Anyway, cities are cool. Should we finish what we started last week?
What I’ve Been Reading This Week
A wonderful, excellent novel that did not totally sell me on the idea of duologies. The acknowledgements page reminded me that this was written during COVID pandemic lockdowns—an incredibly scary time, hard to get a lot done. Still, I also wrote some of my best work then, and it was emotionally taxing. Yup, a freelancer and a 7,000x-Hugo winner: we are the same. Anyway, this series apparently dropped from a trilogy to duology. While I genuinely don’t think it suffered for it—I really love these two books, and think they pull off a trickier task than The Broken Earth trilogy—I totally could’ve been down to spend more time with these characters. Let’s get into The World We Make by N.K. Jemisin.
The World We Make by N.K. Jemisin: you really should read these two excellent novels, so I’ll do some plot stuff while trying not to spoil either book. The uneasy truce that ends The City We Became obviously cannot hold, and The Enemy begins launching a Trump-like incursion into the New York mayor’s race. Important to remember that this novel was published on November 1, 2022. Before Zohran Mamdani was even running, before guy-who-Mamdani-regularly-pushes-around Donald Trump was elected for a second time. While reading, I could feel a nagging corner on my brain—think John Green’s Me From The Past in Crash Course—being like, “is this too heavy-headed” before quickly silencing that part of my brain. A writer must respond at least a little to their times, and we live in extremely stupid and unsubtle times. As Jemisin puts in the acknowledgements, “the United States has always swam in the fashy shallows.”
We meet more cities from the rest of the world, as is fitting for a sequel. The resolution to the conflict, building off of the last book, hinges on both Deciding Not To Be Xenophobic and also Minding Your Own Damn Business, which feel like worthwhile places for an epic eldritch fantasy series to end up. Could we have spent more time with each character? Happily. But I am more than happy to fill in blanks off-page, when each particular episode here is so well-drawn.
To rank is human, so I’ll say this: The Broken Earth trilogy might be a grander, more complete achievement in SFF writing. I will be re-reading The Great Cities duology more because it is a horror series done in a city. That’s more my genre, more my setting. Not much horror is done in cities, so I latch onto it when it is. I also think that writing human avatars of cities is an incredibly difficult thing to pull off. To write cosmopolitanism with seeming effortlessness is a feat.
Now, I know it wasn’t effortless—for one, Jemisin thanks her sensitivity readers in the acknowledgements. For another, we are often reminded of each character’s identity and sexual orientation. This never happens without feeling like it means something to the story, of course. There are no diversity boxes being maliciously ticked, here. It’s simply a multiracial group of people of varying ages, with varying outlooks, because sometimes in city, you have groups like that. Thanks to the mask-off white supremacist times we live in, I can picture a certain type of SFFH reader, who definitely looks like me, crying about wokeness. I’d counter with the fact that various different friend groups I have casually exist like this. The guys I play basketball with and their partners, various groups of work friends, writers around the city I know—you’re just going to have an Indian guy here, a trans woman there, a Filipino guy here, a Black woman there, a Korean nonbinary person, a white gay, someone who you never realized immigrated from Poland or Portugal or whatever. If you live in a city and don’t know an interracial couple, ask yourself some hard questions. The push in the 2010s to increase visible diversity in books/movies/TV shows/wherever, in my view, was a push to make things reflect reality better. How much shit has Friends taken for being nothing but white people? The Great Cities is a refutation of that. Anyone who has actually spent time in a city understands and accepts cosmopolitanism (unless, y’know, they’ve got interdimensional tentacle monsters whispering in their ears, encouraging them to be their worst selves). I’m glad N.K. Jemisin made the novel feel like a real city novel.
Beyond the identity markers, there are other crucial ways that these two books feel quintessentially city novels. People help each other out, whether it’s Douglas Acevedo helping Manny or the faceless masses helping Bronca’s art center in the first book or the faceless masses helping Brooklyn chase off a street gang in the second book. There’s Neek’s “tuning,” where he uses his avatar magic to gently make life a little more bearable for the powerless. Padmini’s big, life-altering crisis at the beginning of the novel gets semi-magical resolution, but the dramatization of the choice feels central to the question of how to be a part of a city. There’s also a lot here to get you jacked up about fighting fascism. Read these two books!
LINKS!
Something to listen to while you browse? I am of the opinion that you absolutely do not gotta hand it to Staten Island (in this book), but I do agree with the sentiment how can you not like Wu Tang??
- No this week in ICE, as I said, I am pre-writing this. I’m sure they did some vile shit, though. Here, check out this recent Behind The Bastards and marvel at how many of our current societal ills were not caused by but certainly encouraged along by a billionaire pedophile who kept blackmail on heads of state, was best friends with our current president, and was beloved by the Ivy League. “How Jeffery Epstein Built The Modern World” Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4
- As a revolutionary leftist who lifts weights, I appreciated this bit of recognition from It’s Been A Minute and NPR: The Swoletariat: a history of leftist fitness
- “just before Rafah” by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha in beestung
- “Death Is A Black Door In The Ghetto” by Caspian Darke in Flash Fiction Online
- These Stories Teach Us How To Fight by Dawn Xiana Moon in Uncanny Magazine
What’re you still doing here? It’s AWP, go read Behind With Knife before diving in to all the books you just bought.
If you work in the service industry, may you clean up in tips this weekend. Not all of us have a city avatar gently guiding us towards easier paths. Not all of us have a mysteriously deep-pocketed family that hints at a very fun prequel book. Just remember that, as The World We Make says, “life runs on chaos math.” It’s hard to predict, and that’s good. Now mind your own business.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris