N.K. Jemisin’s The World We Make is the conclusion to the series she began with 2020’s Hugo-nominated The City We Became, which was a mild surprise since it seemed like this was a longer series in the making. (I thought it was supposed to be a trilogy, but I can’t find a reference to that, although there are interviews with Jemisin where she discusses how real-world events overtook her plans for the series.)
When last we saw our five heroes, the human avatars of New York City and the four boroughs that matter, they were preparing for some sort of showdown with Woman in White, also known as R’lyeh, the destroyer of worlds, who has gotten her long white tentacles into Aislyn, the living avatar of Staten Island, which the authorities could just build a bridge over to get me from Jersey to Brooklyn and I’d be completely fine with it. Anyway, the five good avatars are trying to navigate the new world in which they inhabit, as they’d been previously unaware of the fact that cities were alive and could coopt humans to serve as their living embodiments, while they’re also dealing with some sort of multidimensional enemy they know they can hold off but can’t defeat without help.
In The World We Make, however, we start to hear from other cities, as a couple of their avatars visit New York and also engage in clandestine meetings in a dimension beyond our own to discuss the fate of our world and maybe some others as well. The real gift of this novel, however, isn’t the plot, which can be fun and has a fair amount of action but also largely goes where you’d expect it to go, is the characterization of all of the boroughs and a few of the cities as well. Jemisin has created a world that’s as diverse and lively as New York City itself across all demographics, a multidimensional cast of characters with interconnecting relationships within the quintet and with people outside of it – a daughter, a boss, another city – that keeps the book moving even while the core plot with R’lyeh is still in neutral.
The story slows down when we get to Aislyn, the walking stereotype of the Staten Islander who is afraid of Manhattan to the point that she’s never gone there. Imagine growing up a ferry ride away from (sings in Hamilton) the greatest city in the world, and you never go there for your entire childhood and at least a few years of adulthood. I knew people like that growing up on Long Island, but at least there you could argue that it was an hour away by car, a little more by train, and that’s not much of an excuse but taking the Staten Island Ferry is easier than taking the LIRR and it’s free. She throws her lot in with R’lyeh/The Woman in White, because foreign is bad, more or less, which isn’t a criticism of Jemisin but of the world in which we live, where fear and ignorance led 70 million Americans to vote for Donald Trump. Their interactions are just not that interesting compared to the lively, fun interplay between the characters on the good side of things, or compared to some of the badass action sequences (the one with Brooklyn and the chop shop particularly stands out as some brilliant action writing, a car chase as exciting as anything in Baby Driver but without Ansel Elgort to drag it all down).
It turns out that R’lyeh’s battle against the New Yorkers (sans Staten Island, but that’s basically Jersey anyway) is just a tiny front in a multi-dimensional war where the fate of this specific instance of the universe hangs in the balance, so, yes, it’s up to the four boroughs and the city itself to save the universe from the destroyer of worlds. Jemisin’s trying to set the stakes high enough to keep up the narrative greed, but I never actually believed that the universe would end in the book, and kept waiting for the story to get back to the Furious Five. R’lyeh’s reasons are not that interesting; Aislyn’s are, although she’s such an obvious proxy for the sort of white Trump voters that the New York Times loves to interview in a midwestern diner that her story arc also fails to garner the same interest or connection that the other four boroughs get.
Jemisin has commented in a few places about how real-world events overtook her plans for the series, however long it was supposed to be, and that turned what seemed like it would be an ass-kicking sci-fi series into more of a fun adventure story about a makeshift family and a love letter to New York, or at least the four-fifths of it that count. That still makes for an enjoyable, quick read, but I’m grading Jemisin on a curve here, and I just wanted more from the sequel given how much I loved the first book.
Next up: I just finished R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface and have started Ann Patchett’s latest novel, Tom Lake.
In the author’s notes, she mentions that it was supposed to be a trilogy, but then real world events made it so that she really didn’t want to write any sequels at all. She said though that she thought it was unfair to her fans not to at least end the story, so she changed everything in order to finish it.
Knowing this explains the first fifty pages which are so thinly veiled, angry, and didactic in a way that Jemisin is usually more artful at weaving into her books. As an author and a person though, she’s angry, depressed and writing out of a sense of obligation to her fans, and ends up with a book that is good but just not Jemisin good. I think she knows it, too, which I’m sure has to be rough as a writer.
Yellowface is good, but it has its admitted faults. Babel was terrific by RF Kuang, but it was heavy handed with its message.