Bronca, for example, is faced with a dilemma when a representative of a shady foundation offers to contribute millions of dollars to her art center on the condition that they mount an exhibit of a racist art collective. Some of the challenges its characters face are all too recognizable, from political corruption to real estate chicanery to racism and white supremacists. The city Jemisin portrays is not a generic comic-book metropolis like - well, Metropolis - but rather a living, breathing portrait of the actual city where Jemisin has lived for years. What is most remarkable, given the pulp energy of this classic struggle against eldritch evils, is that “The City We Became” is also an astute interrogation of the realities of New York life. Jemisin's latest book is "The City We Became." (Phillip Faraone / Getty photo) Jemisin doesn’t try to be subtle about the names of the avatars: Bronca is director of the Bronx Art Center, Brooklyn is the actual name of a once-famous rapper who later entered politics, an immigrant Tamil mathematician named Padmini becomes the “Queen of Queens,” a grad student who shows up in Manhattan having lost his memory becomes Manny, and Staten Island is a rather sheltered young Irish American girl named Aislyn.
New York, however, is a city made up of other cities, so it gets six avatars - one for each of the five boroughs and one for the city as a whole. The most recently awakened city, Sao Paulo, sends its avatar (named Paulo, of course) to help the New Yorkers through the change, because this moment of transformation is also a hazardous moment of vulnerability, during which ancient evil forces may try to swoop in and remake the city in their own image. This moment of awakening doesn’t seem to depend on such mundane matters as population or geographical size, which may explain why Paris or Lagos got there before New York.
The central notion is that at some point in its history, each great city achieves consciousness and becomes a living being, embodied in an avatar who may otherwise be an ordinary, anonymous citizen. “The City We Became” is partly a spectacular love letter to New York City in all its diversity, partly the beginning of a new fantasy trilogy, and partly a horror story with roots that go back as far as H.P. The world she portrays in her new novel is a lot closer to home.
Set on an imaginary planet facing catastrophic climate changes, Jemison’s award-sweeping “Broken Earth” trilogy was impressive in part because of its complex characterization and its meticulously detailed world-building, as were her earlier fantasy novels. Jemisin is arguably the most prominent science-fiction writer to emerge so far in the 21st century. After becoming the first African American writer to win the coveted Hugo Award for best novel, the first writer ever to win three consecutive best novel Hugos, and the subject of a long profile in The New Yorker, N.K.
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