The City We Became is a 2020 urban fantasy novel by N. K. Jemisin. It was developed from her short story "The City Born Great," first published in her collection How Long 'til Black Future Month? It is her first novel since her triple Hugo Award-winning Broken Earth series and the first in her Great Cities series, followed by The World We Make due to be released in November 2022
New York comes alive, through six human avatars, but something in the multiverse isn't happy. Explosively creative & often funny. Shares a deep love for the city & its people. Clever use of identity politics and gentrification.
Content warning Spoilers
A unique fantasy story of struggle against an eldritch horror by the diverse "avatars" of New York City as the city is "born" as a sentient entity. The enemy is an alien intelligence, so alien that it comes from another dimension and can't really be contemplated due to its "wrongness." Its manifestation in this world is simply: whiteness. It's a parasitic, devious, violent, very white entity who claims if it doesn't destroy this world, its own world will die. I was ok with being hit over the head with the symbolism, since sometimes I miss subtle stuff. It's been said this book is about gentrification...it seemed to me it's also about white colonization. An otherwise three-star story but I'm giving four stars for its unique ideas & world building.
The bad news first: it's not quite up to the standards set with the Broken Earth Trilogy. Followed by the good news: this is still an excellent start to Jemisin's new trilogy about living cities and I liked it a lot.
The prologue is the short story I already read in How Long Til Black Future Month, in which a young homeless man becomes the city of New York with the help of the embodiment of Sao Paulo, and defeats a threat. But the threat weakens New York, and so he needs the help of the five boroughs Manhattan, Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island to help him battle the Lovecraftian nemesis that is trying to take over New York. The embodied boroughs have to find each other and join up to find New York, and that's not as easy as it seems, as their foe does everything to stop …
The bad news first: it's not quite up to the standards set with the Broken Earth Trilogy. Followed by the good news: this is still an excellent start to Jemisin's new trilogy about living cities and I liked it a lot.
The prologue is the short story I already read in How Long Til Black Future Month, in which a young homeless man becomes the city of New York with the help of the embodiment of Sao Paulo, and defeats a threat. But the threat weakens New York, and so he needs the help of the five boroughs Manhattan, Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island to help him battle the Lovecraftian nemesis that is trying to take over New York. The embodied boroughs have to find each other and join up to find New York, and that's not as easy as it seems, as their foe does everything to stop them.
This book is woke as fuck. The boroughs are all PoC with the exception of Staten Island, four out of five are female, some are queer, and they fight against the alt-right, cybermobbing, and capitalism. The PoC are African-American, Tamil, Native American, and in the acknowledgements they all had their own sensitivity readers. It's a giant love letter to New York, and makes me want to go there again, even though that's as far away as possible now. It's also a giant fuck-you to militant Lovecraft fans as HP Lovecraft gets called out as a racist, sexist, homophobic dipshit, and then the Mythos is used anyhow to represent the enemy.
Damn, I felt bad for Staten Island. This book made me feel sympathetic to a racist bigot from the burbs.
It's a great book, but it does not have the twist and turns that Broken Earth had. Still, if you enjoyed any of her work, you might enjoy her take on urban fantasy and Lovecraftian horrors as well.
