The Great Cities #1

The City We Became is the first book in a modern urban fantasy duology set in New York. The premise is that every city, once it gets big/old enough, develops a soul, with a human avatar to represent it. If a city is big enough, it might have several avatars. New York has six avatars, one for each borough and an overarching one for the whole city, each drawn from the diversity of the city. The concept was originally written as a short story, The City Born Great, in 2017, available to read on the Reactor Magazine website. This short story basically became the opening of The City We Became, with a few minor text changes, and with a changed ending, needed to flow into the rest of the book. It’s worth a read and gives you a taste for what the book is like.

This is a mad book which is great fun to read. The ‘main’ avatar is ‘born’ first, aided by the avatar of São Paulo. The most recently awoken city always comes to help the newest apparently. Paulo, as he is known, warns New York that he will need to fight the ‘enemy’. This is what happens to all new cities. This enemy is not clearly defined or identified by Paulo and New York feels a little out of his depth as he first encounters the nightmarish creature. But he draws on the strength of his City and seems to comprehensively defeat it. Then, in his moment of triumph, something goes wrong and he just vanishes. Paulo realises that the City has taken the weakened and vulnerable New York avatar somewhere for safekeeping, and that there must be other avatars that are needed to complete the process. Having thought his role was over, Paulo now has to find the others and help them come together. He doesn’t manage to get to them in time to give them any warning, though.

We then start encountering the other avatars. There are stereotypes associated with each borough, and the avatars each represent something of these stereotypes. At one point in the book some of these are described: “belonging is as quintessential to Staten Islandness as toughness is to the Bronx and starting over is to Queens and weathering change is to Brooklyn”. Each avatar takes on an essence of their borough; something that other New Yorkers associate with the character of their borough. These attributes contribute to the different superpowers each of the avatars develops and also sets up some of the conflict between them. Each is in turn attacked by the same enemy, with no idea at first what is happening to them and no guidance from Paulo who is too slow to locate them. They might not know what is going on, but each instinctively fights back in their own way. Except for one. The enemy uses a different approach with one that is so subtle they don’t even realise they are being attacked. They do feel that something is wrong, but because of who they are, they fail to associate the wrongness to the real enemy and leave themselves open to manipulation.

The first part of the book seems to mostly be an introduction of each of the avatars. While there is some action, it is overshadowed by us getting to know all the players. The main conflict develops more fully once we get to the second half, with the ‘enemy’ gradually being revealed to us as something straight out of Lovecraft. We even get R’lyeh starting to materialise in the world! This makes the second half more gripping to read, with new revelations coming at us swiftly. The Lovecraftian villain threatens not only New York, but the entire world as she grows in strength. Our avatars belatedly realise that the enemy has been planning pre-emptive strikes against cities, ahead of them coming to life, weakening them before they can fully form. The attack on New York is the culmination of long planning.

Jemisin includes a lot of social commentary in this book. We get institutionalised racism, xenophobia, sexism, corruption of power, homophobia and probably lots more that will pop out at me if I ever read this a second time. The enemy works mainly through other people, inciting hate groups and encouraging othering to divide people. She uses fear to get her initial foothold and builds on this, always trying to turn groups against each other, driving deeper and deeper wedges. The avatars instinctively realise that they need to work together to fight back effectively. Without this coming-together, they have no way to fight back. Jemisin isn’t subtle about this. Sometimes the message seems to be delivered with a sledgehammer, but a sledgehammer is sometimes what is needed to break through preconceived ideas people have.

The fantasy elements of the book integrate into our real world, making this a compelling story. The only issue I really had with the book was that we didn’t get a completely even focus on each of the boroughs. The Bronx and Brooklyn avatars each get fairly comprehensive background, but we learn very little about Queens, and Manhattan remains an enigma to the end, to us and even to himself. We get enough background on Staten Island to understand her behaviour, but I thought we needed more on her. But perhaps we will get more on these aspects in the second book of the duology, The World We Make?