The City We Became - N.K. Jemisin

Update, 5 Aug 2021: I was wrong about many parts of this book! Through hosting a sci-fi book club here at Stanford, and chatting about the book with a bunch of folks, I came to appreciate some things that I viewed as problems. Note, the next couple of lines contain spoilers!

First, the portrayal of Queens as an Indian woman who is good at math is not just a stereotype, because she is a dalit person. While there are still strong stereotypical elements in her portrayal, the underlying story of a person rejected from Indian society who can still find a home in NYC is quite uplifting.

Second (spoilers), I had no idea that the antagonist is an H.P. Lovecraft creation. That is, this book is cast in many ways as a takedown of Lovecraft's racism.

Third, my fellow book-clubbers and I agreed that this book is rushed, or too short. But, it is perhaps the beginning of a trilogy! So, in the spirit of N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy, I anticipate that one should treat the entire upcoming trilogy as a single book.

However, in the spirit of past reviews, I am leaving the following text unedited to preserve my feelings at the time. I still didn't really enjoy the book, and think it has plenty of issues. But, not as many as I originally complained about!

This book certainly seemed up my alley. I was especially excited to relive my childhood fantasies of having an apartment in Manhattan. But, unfortunately, The City We Became was not the wonderful New York sci-fi dream I hoped it would be.

Let me point out that the book's cover is slathered with rave reviews from big names, and Jemisin is a massively impressive author. I just didn't enjoy this book. Funnily enough, I just watched an episode of Gilmore Girls where one of the main characters has to deal with the consequences of writing a negative review about a ballet. If you, dear reader, strongly object to my negative review, please know that I have endeavored to criticize a book I dislike without attacking an author I admire.

The plot setup is more or less as follows. Six people (of pointedly diverse ethnicities and identities) wake up to discover that they have become living avatars of New York City and its boroughs (Manhattan, Brooklyn, The Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island). But, at the same time, an Enemy is attempting to destroy the city by, for example, crumbling its infrastructure (a bridge collapses via giant tentacles), mind-controlling its population, and fiddling with its economy. Mind games and superpower-fueled battles ensue.

There are some spoilers from here on. TL;DR: read Jemisin's other, very excellent books instead of this one.

First, let me point out what I enjoyed. I loved the overarching theme: cities are themselves conscious, multiverse-spanning entities. They are products of human cooperation, and thereby take on a life of their own. This elegantly capitalizes on (and makes literal) the idea that, in huge cities, you feel a special character. I found especially endearing the character who embodies São Paulo, sent to help New York become a city. However, I will qualify that, overall, the book's implementation and description of superconsciousness felt less refined than the ideas in Ancillary Justice.

I also really enjoyed how this book tied current events into its narrative, blending speculative fiction and fantasy. The author put a ton of effort to weave in references to recent events and technologies; it feels like the plot could be happening today. Most tidily, the book explains how cities that have been recently beaten down by natural disasters (New Orleans and Port-au-Prince) were in fact crushed by the Enemy during what should have been their marvelous births. So, our real-world events are the side effects of an interdimensional war.

Unfortunately, I have far more problems than praise.

First, I felt a lack of any palpable conflict in the plot. At no point was I ever really worried for the main characters; every time they got into a fight with the Enemy, they won by magically and suddenly discovering a new superpower. The protagonists don't experience any loss. They just talk about the possibility of millions of people dying, or the possibility of massive natural disasters occurring. There is no satisfying training montage. At the climax, the Enemy reveals itself as a competing, non-human interdimensional city -- and is promptly routed in a couple of paragraphs by the NYC avatars. Note that I'm not alone in feeling this way, as this complaint is echoed in the book's praise-filled NPR review.

The only character who doesn't win -- the Staten Island avatar -- is in no way forced to reckon with her bigotry or to grow as a person. Instead, the Enemy escapes total destruction and sets up camp on Staten Island, which is rejected from the rest of NYC. Given that Staten Island "goes red when the other boroughs go blue" (to paraphrase a passage from the book), this rejection fits the narrative theme, but furthers a lack of conflict and resolution.

The root of my complaint above is that the book is just too short. The story has a so many ideas that are never given space to grow. We see hints of parallel universes, avatars of cities on Earth, and beings who experience time differently from us, just to name a few. But none of these get sufficient stage time in the compact, rushed plot. The avatars are born, figure out their powers, and beat the Enemy, all in a New York minute. A secondary effect of this is that many characters and ideas never recur or have callbacks. For me, a plot that folds intricately into itself makes stories like Altered Carbon (which has plenty of men-writing-women problems) or The Broken Earth so engaging. By contrast, in The City We Became, characters and entire plotlines appear briefly and then never again.

As a consequence of the book's shortness, its diversity and antiracism message feels caricatured. Note that this is a book written in troubling times. It's 2020, and the killings by police of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, among far too many others, are forcing a reckoning with the systemic racism baked into our culture. A core purpose of  The City We Became is to give voice to the pain, hurt, and frustration that so many of us feel. And yet, in, it feels as though the text is bent and twisted into stereotypical expositions of racism.

Consider a few examples of these expositions: NYC's avatar repeatedly mentions the certainty of being harassed by police due to his skin color; Staten Island's avatar's father is a racist cop who tries to hook her up with a Neo-Nazi; Manhattan's avatar has to confront a white woman filming him in a park; The Bronx's avatar, an art director, has to review shock-art from a white collective of race-baiters. Each of these is a real and pressing issue that painfully affects people from marginalized groups every day, and places burdens on people that white people can all-too-easily ignore. But, because they are all smashed together into a short fantasy novel, they feel flat and unrefined.

The goal of these scenes seems to be to make white readers feel guilt and shame, which is completely valid for the author to pursue. I can imagine Jemisin (like so many of us) has been in pain, and needed to vent it in her own way. But, these scenes provide no movement to the plot, which means the entire book is a bunch of stereotypical racially-charged encounters strung into a thin story. We don't get to know or care about the characters being attacked and harassed, and we don't get to explore the deep and exciting multiverse that Jemisin envisions. Instead, we bounce between stress-inducing and disconnected exhibitions of racism and bigotry. It's like scrolling through a political subreddit and feeling gradually more inflamed by each post.

The shock-art scene was especially frustrating because it describes the art in explicit detail. I don't understand why there is so much effort spent imagining and describing this art, when the point of the scene was that experiencing such art subconsciously fuels bigotry. It felt masochistic.

Another miss, which particularly bothered me, is that Queens' avatar is an Indian immigrant whose defining character trait is being really good at math. If the point of the book is to defy stereotypes and break bigotry, then why is this character written in this way? The acknowledgements at the end of the book thank sensitivity readers who presumably helped edit these passages, and yet left glaring stereotypes in the text and integral to the plot.

As a final example of how the book caricatures racial issues, the Enemy appears as a Woman in White, and as white tendrils and growths on people and objects throughout the city. That is, whiteness is the Enemy. Not white fear, or racism, but whiteness itself! Dovetailing with this, the book discusses how chains such as Starbucks and Dunkin' Donuts are conduits for the Enemy because they destroy the individuality of a city. Yes, big chain stores crush small local businesses. But, we didn't have time to get to know any such businesses or fall in love with NYC before it was besieged. Thus, the Enemy felt like a cliché.

Perhaps I should interpret this book akin to Neil Gaiman's take on Adam and Eve with dark skin in Good Omens. But, the cartoonishly bigoted characters (and an insistence on detailing the race of every character) made the book feel shallow and petty, instead of refined and diverse. I would instead recommend reading The Broken Earth to see how elegantly and artfully Jemisin can fold diversity and inclusion into a fantasy narrative.

So, read this book if you want to. But, in sci-fi and fantasy, there are plenty better ways to experience New York City (e.g., New York 2140) or diversity and inclusion (The Broken Earth or Ancillary Justice).