Hugos 2021: The City We Became by N. K. Jemisin

Published: 2020
Acquired and read: August 2021

The Great Cities Trilogy, Book One: The City We Became

by N. K. Jemisin

I enjoyed Jemisin's previous fantasy trilogy, The Broken Earth, a lot, particularly its first volume. Despite being fantasy, I felt it had the doubling effect that for me makes the best science fiction: it had a rigorously extrapolated secondary world, but it was also a metaphor for our world. This new novel is, as far as I know, the first book by Jemisin that falls into the Mendlesohn category of "intrusion fantasy" rather than "immersive fantasy," and perhaps for that reason, I found the commentary much less interesting. The basic premise is that when they reach certain levels of complexity, cities are "born" and acquire living avatars, but there are dark forces out there willing to destroy cities to stop this from happening. New York City is undergoing that process during the course of this novel, but because it has multiple boroughs, it has multiple avatars, who must find each other and learn to work together.

I had a number of problems with the book. It drags. As a friend of mine also pointed out, the reader understands what its going on by the end of the prologue, but it takes the characters over four hundred pages to figure it out for themselves, and to undertake the pretty mundane task of finding one another. And while the orogenes in The Broken Earth were potent metaphors for various aspects of chattel slavery, I felt like The City We Became didn't really engage with the potential complexities of its premise. The city avatars are basically all good, and the city is coming to life is a good thing, and they are a charming team of ethnically diverse heroes; the bad guys are all evil racists. But surely cities—and here my thoughts are influenced by James Scott's Seeing Like a State—are born of the push and pull between complexity and simplification. Cities are diverse places, but they are also always trying to contain and stamp out and systematize their own diversity in order to make it legible and therefore controllable. Without this, I would argue, you have no city. A city planner wants things in neat grids, and is willing to smash those who gets in their way; an American city in particular, is born of stolen land. I feel like some of this is touched on vaguely, but not really dealt with. I feel like there's another version of this book that's about cities coming to life in all their mess just being a thing that is, rather than a thing that's good, and I think that book is probably more interesting than this one.

This is made worse by the fact that the social commentary in The City We Became ranges from the obvious to the banal. It felt to me like it was written by Twitter: the villain is clearly a Karen, and there are definite echoes of the Chris Cooper birdwatching incident (though that actually happened after the book was written). Jemisin's book doesn't have anything new or interesting to say about those topics; it's pretty much all the exact same way you would get people snarkily commenting on it online. There's a particularly risible subplot about evil bro fascist racist progressive artists which completely failed to convince me that its villains were real people; again, it felt like an online stereotype of a category of person I'm not completely convinced actually exists. On top of that, this subplot is resolved stupidly easy; basically someone tweets "help out our art gallery," and it's all taken care of in a couple paragraphs.

Anyway, overall I found this pretty disappointing considering the strength of Jemisin's other work, and I imagine I will only read future installments if "forced" to do so by them being Hugo finalists in future years.