Jemisin has lived in New York for many years, and she brings that authority to bear on the novel. Places are never just places in a piece of writing-they are as essential a character as any of the people populating a story. This time Jemisin projects the elusive identity of the New Yorker into a brighter, crueler dimension, a place where our evils are not changed but illuminated, and she does so by taking so many of our contemporary problems to horrifying extremes.
In “The City We Became”, Jemisin picks a far less fantastic setting for her novel: New York, but what she does with it is no less ambitious. It was a complex, intricate mechanism of a book, an ingeniously imagined sprawl set in a world that periodically undergoes violent, life-threatening apocalypses. I found my way to Jemisin’s “Fifth Season” a couple years ago, and pleasurably devoured it. Let me show you what lurks in the empty spaces where nightmares dare not tread.” New York must go on, it must survive-no matter the cost. They must save the City before the Enemy sets its jaws upon it. The primary avatar is a shrinking beacon, a lighthouse viewed too far from port, and they drift toward him, like a magnet drawn to its inevitable polarity. Luckily, the City has scattered itself like breadcrumbs, dusted across its boroughs, and all five of them are stirring from stillness, tugging insistently on some rope drawn tight inside their avatars who must find each other, follow the paths that they see in their minds, a line that runs through New York, zig-zagging, curving, coiling-and it leads to him. He is weak and unsteady as moonlight on water, and the City was a candle that might burn out if he waited too long.
New York might be born in the world only to be shown right out of it.Įarly in “The City We Became”, New York’s human avatar, a young queer Black man living in the streets, tries to salvage the City, to hold the breaking jar, keep his fingers over the cracks, but a battle with the Enemy-who sent forth the police as its harbingers-had worn him to little more than edges.
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