Review: The World We Make (Great Cities 2) by N.K.Jemisin

The sequel to The City We Became completes the story with the avatars of New York boroughs forced into a final confrontation with the ghastly Woman in White. There are a few dangling plot threads, particularly around Manhattan, that leave open the possibility of a second plot arc for the NYC crew but if you don’t start a fantasy series until the story is complete, you would be safe to start this one now.

The recipe is much the same as the first book and you can read the two of them as one longer novel. It’s a mix of fun conceits (cities expressing themselves as individual people), nods to cosmic horror, and contemporary politics & social issues. The horror aspects are definitely nods rather than a genre crossover in part because the lingering cosmic evil, The Woman in White, has far too much fun to be nightmarish.

Where this second half of the story differs from the first is in providing an expanded view of the world of the cities. There are side trips to Instanbul (and his cats), Tokyo and London (a not entirely sane avatar who consumed her multitude of composite avatars). We also get a populist bigot running for mayor and a thinly disguised version of the Proud Boys acting as violent goons for the Woman in White’s machinations.

In my review of The City We Became I referenced Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, a TV show that became a novel. Gaiman’s work is famously adaptable, with many of his works appearing in different formats while retaining their intrinsic aspects. I loved Coraline the book but the film version has become the more definitive version in my head. I mention this because the Great Cities duology has this odd feeling for me as if it were a novelisation of a graphic novel.

Partly this feeling of a shift in the medium is due to the adjacency of the premise to a superhero story. It is, after all, a story about ordinary people who gain superpowers and team up to fight a supervillain. That aspect is intensified by the New York setting, the most comic-book, superhero city in the world just on the number of Marvel characters based there and double/triple that once we pile in Metropolis and Gotham. Jemisin does a good job of evoking a visual experience via the written word and in a non-graphic format, you have the advantage of generating your own visuals. It’s New York, so although it is not a city I’ve ever visited, it is one which I’ve seen over and over in film and television (and comic books). I’ve less to go on though when it comes to poor old Staten Island.

Even so, with Neek, in particular, being a visual artist, I kept feeling like while this was a pair of books I was enjoying, with the right artist, this would have been a more phenomenal work.