NK Jemisin

The American writer tells us about her new urban fantasy series

CITIES, IT’S OFTEN SAID, HAVE DISTINCT characters, like people. It’s an idea that was uppermost in the mind of NK Jemisin (Nora, if you’re wondering) when, a few years back, she wrote a short story called ‘The City Born Great”, set in her current home of New York. “The mythology of that story is that when all large cities reach a certain point of sophistication – and it’s not necessarily size, it’s when cities have a legend, when they are alive in the minds of people who live there and visit – the city goes through a weird transformation and comes to life, and becomes a sentient being,” she says. “And there is a human being in every case that’s chosen as the avatar for that city.”

BORN UNDER PUNCHES

But as Jemisin’s The City We Became – her wildly imaginative opener to a new urban fantasy trilogy – explores, getting born is dangerous. Aside from anything else, something that’s alive can be injured or killed, and the new book begins shortly after “something happens to the overall avatar” of New York. As to what to do about it, that’s down to the avatars of New York’s five boroughs, The Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens and Staten Island, who have to work together.

Presumably that process isn’t smooth? “No, books need conflict,” deadpans Jemisin. The novel, she tells SFX via Skype, was “supposed to just be silly fun”, in part because her previous trilogy – the Broken Earth series that dealt with, among other things, climate change – was “just rough, difficult to write and difficult to read, emotionally draining”.

And the book is fun – albeit that Jemisin’s version of fun features “existential horror”, “some truly harrowing moments” and commentary on the changing nature of our cities, especially due to gentrification. As in London, New York is blighted by developments where luxury condos are bought by investors and lie empty. Meantime, the city’s homelessness problem grows, and even the middle classes are being forced out.

“In the end there’s an almost mythic battle happening here,” she says, “between the energy cities need to thrive, the mix of people and professions, and these forces that are determined to profit from cities at all costs, even if it kills them. It’s impossible if you understand it not to see that as a parasitic force. So why wouldn’t I then talk about that parasitic force as an energy, or as a living thing?

“So that’s the energy the avatars are fighting throughout this trilogy. Granted, it’s embodied in an almost Lovecraftian, extra-dimensional entity, but the power it derives its strengths from are real-world things.”

There’s inevitably a political element to this. While the book doesn’t make direct reference to Donald Trump, it does deal with the forces that Trump’s populism has unleashed. In thinly veiled fashion, for example, it touches on the actions of the far-right Proud Boys, a group that dubiously claims to be concerned with “Western values” and has been linked with street attacks. While, says Jemisin, “horrible, racist things” have often happened in New York’s history, there’s a sense here of the city being targeted from outside.

Even Trump himself, a quintessentially New York figure in many respects, has launched broadsides against the Big Apple. “He trashes us to appeal to his base,” says Jemisin. “This is part of the energy that I’m trying to capture. There is an ugliness happening for short-term gain that’s going to have long-term negative effects on not just New York City, but the country and the world. We’re seeing this play out again and again. And I don’t know what to make of it, other than to try and make a book of it.”

APPETITE FOR DISTRACTION

Quite a book it is too, a paean to the spirit of the people of the five boroughs written by someone who emphasises that she sees herself as a New York insider-outsider – someone who lives in Brooklyn, yet has spent time in other cities including Mobile, Alabama and Boston. It’s also the first new project for Jemisin since, after eight novels, she’s become a bona fide SFF literary star.

She speculates that she might have made the bestseller list more quickly were she better able to do the same thing again and again. “I don’t like the idea of anyone being able to point to any style or topic and say, ‘That’s an NK Jemisin book,’” she says. “NK Jemisin is all over the place – NK Jemisin has no attention span!” Indeed, she’s distracted by cats on two separate occasions and, because she’s looking for a new couch, cranes her neck to see our sofa fabric.

She doesn’t know what she’ll do once the trilogy is complete – but then do any of us? “The world has become an incredibly shitty novel, and I don’t know what to do about that,” she says. “I don’t know that any writer does.”

The world has become an incredibly shitty novel, and I don’t know what to do about that