★★★★☆ The World We Make, by NK Jemisin
When it's up to New York to save the Universe...
The World We Make
NK Jemisin
When it’s up to New York to save the Universe...
The World We Make is a sort of grand mish-mash of stuff. Mostly very cool and some wonderful stuff, but still a mish-mash. As N.K. Jemisin explains in her acknowledgements, "The real world moves faster than fiction." She had plans, well-thought-out plans I would guess, for a trilogy. Reality broke them, so we ended up with this duology.
The novels of the Great Cities Series are very political. Although he is never named, it will be obvious (at least to American readers), that this was a novel written in the shadow of Donald Trump. Does Jemisin love him or hate him? You can probably guess. I am actually a little surprised that there are not already dozens of 1-star reviews out there from the Usual Suspects. They will come in time, I'm sure.
The City We Became ended on a cliffhanger. Well, not exactly a cliffhanger, because the shadow of looming disaster was not so immediate as that. However, it was clear that, while she got New York City out of its immediate peril at the end of that novel, Jemisin left behind broader threats, not just to New York, but to reality as we know it. To wit, the avatars of New York, in becoming avatars, learned that for thousands of years some entity had been fighting the emergence of cities' souls on Earth. That fight took the form of a multinational corporation. Total Multiversal War, LLC, and a Lovecraftian Horror, the City named R'lyeh. What's more, one of the five boroughs of New York, Staten Island, betrayed the city and gave R'lyeh a foothold. (The big plot twist of City We Became was when Jersey City stepped in to save the day as a sixth extralegal borough.)
R'lyeh is still there, hovering over Staten Island and sucking all the juice out of it, and threatening destruction to the rest of New York. Total Multiversal War, LLC is still out there, prosecuting total multiversal war. That's what we face when World We Make begins. The action really kicks off when a new candidate for mayor of New York shows up. He's called Panfilo, and his slogan is "Make New York Great Again". Sound familiar? He threatens not just New York politics, but also the existence of New York as a city with a soul. Our heroes Neek, Manny, Padmini, Bronca, Brooklyn, Vereza, and even Aislyn step up to the fight. ("Neek? Who is that?" I hear you asking. Well, remember how there was a street artist who became the "primary", the avatar of the whole of New York, at the end of City We Became? He has a name now, Neek, his pronunciation of NYC.)
They each fight in their own ways, but Padmini, the avatar of Queens, who is also the Math Queen, has a particularly central role to play, because she is the only one who understands quantum mechanics, and the battle takes place, as we already knew from the first book, in a quantum multiverse. (Jemisin's understanding of quantum mechanics, I am sad to say, is deeply wrong and distorted, but this is not a physics class, so just suck it up and pretend to believe.) Also the politician, Brooklyn (three guesses as to which borough she's the avatar of), steps up to the political fight. We also get to meet some other cities. Sao Paulo and Hong Kong, whom we met in City We Became, are back, and we also meet London and Paris and a bunch more. That's all good fun.
There is a huge climactic battle, which is the best part of the book, even though it doesn't really make much sense.
So, it was fun. I enjoyed it. I am sorry that Donald Trump and Covid-19 disrupted Jemisin's plans for the trilogy -- I feel that we might have gotten truly great literature from her, instead of this Fast-and-Furious-esque romp. But I am definitely glad to have read it.