The World We Make

Product Information

Every great city has a soul. A human avatar that embodies their city's heart and wields its magic. New York? She's got six. Third, the story has numerous holes that are glaring and galling. How come Manny's family knows about Cities? Why do the Proud Men disrupt the court proceedings? What happens to the passengers that went overboard during the ferry episode? How do cities communicate with each other? Why is there such discrepancy between campaign financing scrutiny on the two sides of the mayoral race? Fifth, while some of the toxicity towards white people and corporations has been played down vs the previous installment, some of it persists, and it is both annoying and lazy. Even within the universe that the author creates, banks and corporations should be as much a part of the fabric of NY as working class people and minorities. N.K. Jemisin’s Great Cities Duology, which began with The City We Becameand concludes with The World We Make, is a masterpiece of speculative fiction from one of the most importantwriters of her generation.

Anywho, I liked this one. I didn't love it as much as the first, but it was still good, despite the weak climax. COVID-19, racial unrest, and a Trump presidency collided with Jemisin's original plans for the series causing her to redraft the second novel as a conclusion to a duology. Now, the reading of the novel with these facts at hand make the book more interesting on a few levels. First, I'm in some ways glad this is the end of the series: this just hews too close to the parts of reality I'm looking to escape from in my reading. Secondly, The World We Make feels overstuffed with ideas in a way that suggests a larger structure and plan that was condensed. First of all, I would like to thank Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with an early copy of the book in return for an honest review. As this is part 2 of a duology, you can also find my review of part 1 on Goodreads.And you know what other author displayed those exact same flaws when he wrote? HP Lovecraft. If you *like* incomprehensible ancient tentacled horrors from beyond the realm of spacetime and you're able to forgive Lovecraft, you have to forgive Jemisin.

The City We Becametakes a broad-shouldered stand on the side of sanctuary, family and love. It's a joyful shout, a reclamation and a call to arms." ― The New York TimesNew York City tries hard to deal with the Woman in White on their own but eventually, two things become clear. The first is that they can’t do it on their own. The second is that it is definitely not just “their problem”. If the other cities cannot get over their elitism and listen then the whole world is in danger. The enemy has been infecting humans, spreading hateful messages and inciting unrest and violence, and it must be stopped before it kills off all the living cities and crushes the universe. Jemisin embodies the spirit of the city in as lush and lively a voice as ever and does a masterful job incorporating even more history and magic' Publishers Weekly After all, thoughts are also energy. Our bodies make electricity and those electrical impulses in our brains create our thoughts. So could our thoughts become real? What if enough people have the same thoughts? Could that much energy become an actual thing? N.K. Jemisin takes that premise and goes further. Could enough thoughts and feelings about a city bring it to life? Can a city have a soul? Find out in The World We Make.

New York City isn’t the only sentient city in The World We Make. All the large cities of the world (except American cities for reasons that eventually are revealed) have avatars. The older cities form a cantankerous, stubborn oversight committee of sorts that sort of governs the sentient cities. They have a system where the previous youngest city mentors the current youngest city. This way the old cranky cities don’t have to deal with young avatars as they learn the ins and outs of being a sentient city. The older cities really don’t like being bothered by the younger cities. When New York City tries to ask for help because the enemy is still harassing them, the old cities basically say “your problem, leave us alone”. An interconnected world The story continues to follow the conflict between the newborn New York and its borroughs on the one hand, and the Ur on the other. The conflict between Staten Island and the other NY borroughs also persists. We get introduced to many other cities, finally understand the reasons for the meta conflict, get a glimpse of the metaverse (with some quantum physics for dummies to boot), discover more about the relationships between and of the protagonists, receive further doses of vitriol against modern capitalism and the dominant political system, and participate in a mayoral race. Oh and there is also the micro universe. No spoilers though. Just teasers. In this follow-up to The City We Became (2020), the human avatars of New York City battle an extradimensional threat to the multiverse. Every great city has a soul. A human avatar that embodies their city's heart and wields its magic. New York? She's got six. But all is not well in the city that never sleeps.’ So, in The World We Make exactly what we just talked about happens. When a city becomes so well defined and has special enough characteristics, has a personality if you will, it comes to life. Now, this doesn’t mean that the light poles start dancing and the sidewalk starts shifting around. In The World We Make it means that a human (or more than one, depending on the city) becomes an avatar for the city.Four-time Hugo Award-winning and New York Times bestselling author N.K. Jemisin crafts a glorious tale of identity, resistance, magic and myth.