The World We Make

Product Information

stars for robin miles being robin miles for 12 straight hours on the audiobook, who cares what else is going on- Second, while characters develop, they develop without the full narrative of how and why. They just change. Like Neek. And it's never clear why. Some of the most exciting and powerful fantasy writing of today...Jemisin's latest will attract...even those who don't typically read genre fiction." ― Booklist (starred review)

You see, our reality is just one of many possible realities and some interdimensional beings have decided it’s their job to go around supervising and shaping these different realities. They really don’t like when cities become conscious and they send in their creation, the Woman in White, to try and exterminate the new life. 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. 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. In The World We Make, a city’s soul is represented by an individual resident who becomes its avatar. New York City has an avatar, as does each of its five boroughs (and Jersey City, an honorary sixth borough). The avatars embody New York in all its multicultural glory, representing a wide spectrum of gender, race, religion, ethnic and linguistic origin, sexual orientation, political engagement, domicile, education, and class positions—a rebuke to the many stories about NYC that erase people of color. Insisting on a monochromatic story, however, is The Woman In White, the avatar of R’lyeh, an extra-dimensional city invading our world. R’lyeh is one of H. P. Lovecraft’s most famous creations, a lost city housing a demon seeking to obliterate humankind. Phantasmagoric battles are waged between the avatars and regular New Yorkers on one side and The Woman In White and her legions of monsters on the other.

Rate And Review

The World We Make at times feels rushed. Jemisin’s febrile inventions outrun the plot (which may not be a shortcoming after all, as it reminds me of the tumult at major intersections in the city). It also feels uncomprehensive, since even Jemisin’s uncanny prescience can hardly keep pace with recent events. (Jemisin has noted that the New York of the first book no longer exists post-COVID, and that she chose to curtail the originally planned trilogy.) 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. My thanks to Little, Brown Book Group U.K./Orbit for an eARC via NetGalley of ‘The World We Make’ by N. K. Jemisin.

As always, Jemisin's writing is visionary and immersive...[Jemisin is] a science-fiction/fantasy GOAT." ― GQ In terms of concepts: holy over-boiling pot Batman! I loved the ventures into the multiverse, but they felt like small morsels of larger set pieces I wanted to get into. Sure, the "lost city" ventures with Padmini are cool, but I craved the rest of that history in a way that made the final scene in that setting a little flat. My absolute favourite portions of the novel are the different aspects of New York visiting other cities' avatars. I could read an entire novel where Manny walks the streets of foreign cities just looking to have a chat with similarly powered up humans. Some of these sections feel almost like Sandman-era Gaiman, which is among the highest compliment I'm able to offer to any fantasy! Look, if NK Jemisin decides to maybe write a third book, I will happily write to her editors and push for it to be called New City, Who Dis?. Four-time Hugo Award-winning and New York Times bestselling author N.K. Jemisin crafts a glorious tale of identity, resistance, magic and myth.I *do* like incomprehensible ancient tentacled horrors from beyond the realm of spacetime, and I not only forgive Lovecraft, I love him, and I love him with my eyes open. Without his deeply held conviction that a single Irishman walking down one street five states over is a destabilizing abomination that threatens the very core of physical reality, there would *be* no cosmic horror. American politics, particularly American racial politics, are and always have been at the heart of this genre.