More Nebula (and now /Hugo, since they’ve been announced) shortlist reading. I read several books in between that I enjoyed, but aren’t getting their own blog posts… however if you want my opinion, Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf is great. I also read the graphic novel of The Old Guard, having recently seen (and loved!) the film, and was surprised how close the narratives of the two remained for most of the way through, while still both being very good in their own medium.
But The City We Became is what I’m actually going to discuss properly, because Nebulas. This is the first in a new series (The Great Cities) for Jemisin, and I think(?) the first of hers I’d describe as urban fantasy. The blurb runs thus:
Five New Yorkers must come together in order to defend their city.
Every city has a soul. Some are as ancient as myths, and others are as new and destructive as children. New York City? She’s got five.
But every city also has a dark side. A roiling, ancient evil stirs beneath the earth, threatening to destroy the city and her five protectors unless they can come together and stop it once and for all…
The only other thing I knew about this book going in, besides the above, was that there might be some Lovecraftian weirdness in there somewhere.
I should set out my stall on this one before I get into it: I have never loved a Jemisin book I’ve read. I thought The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms was absolute shite (made more so by the fact I ended up having to read it twice). I thought the Broken Earth Trilogy was better, but I still never saw why people adored it. It was good – it was fine, I couldn’t really see much wrong with it. There were neat things it did that I went “ooh, that was clever” to, or ideas I liked or parts I found vividly visual (the floating obelisks). But it never sang to me, and I never connected particularly with any of the characters. I never liked any of them. But hey, this is Jemisin doing urban fantasy right? I like urban fantasy. Maybe this time it’ll be different? Maybe I’ll really like this one?
Yeah that is not how it went down.
I have three issues with the book, overall. Two of them I think are entirely legit issues, and one of them I think could very easily be a book issue, a me issue, or both simultaneously. So I’m going to start with that one.
When you’re reading an urban fantasy book, situating it firmly within its specific urban environment is a big part of the deal, right? All the ones I’ve read and enjoyed, the ones I’ve seen do well critically, are ones where the urban setting is intrinsic to the telling of the story – it’s as much about the city as the characters and the plot and the magic. But this obviously creates a problem – ideally, not everyone who’s read the book will have been to the city, or have such a strong working knowledge of it that they’ll recognise all your name-dropped streets and pancake houses*, so you need to make the setting accessible to your readers who aren’t already familiar with it, or make the lack of accessibility worthwhile because everything else is so good. And there are definitely novels that do make it work – I’ve never been to Johannesburg, but I enjoyed Lauren Beukes’ Zoo City. I’ve never been anywhere in Russia at all, and I loved all the Sergei Lukyanenko Night Watch books. The latter particularly was a great example of novels that conjured up a vivid sense of place, and tied it in to often very specific sites, but without so much assumption on my part that it became impenetrable. Things came up that I did not expect but it was apparent in the way the story was told how they fit in, whether they were unfamiliar because they were invented for the story, or simply a product of an unfamiliar city.
The City We Became… does not achieve this. Part of this is surely because I have a horrifically limited knowledge of New York, where it’s set. If you’d asked me to name the five boroughs of New York, I definitely wouldn’t have succeeded. I’m not sure I’d have got more than “Manhattan” right, although the names of them were familiar to me once they got introduced**. We’re talking a very very low baseline of knowledge, here. But the amount of knowledge the books assumes of me is… not that. A lot of what goes on with the characters and settings assumes I have preconceived ideas about the idiosyncrasies and character of the different boroughs, and relies on my being party to shared cultural touchstones that I’m just… not. And like, yeah, that’s on me. I know sod all. But it felt like the book had zero interest in hand-holding me through it, or making the book particularly worth my while without that fluency in New York, and so it just felt a bit hollow. There’s a huge lot of what’s being done that I can’t really assess, because I have nothing to tally up Jemisin’s picture of the Bronx against. And that’s just unsatisfying. I can’t speak to the London urban fantasy I’ve read, but the ones set in other cities do do something to get me an in, to let me connect with it as a place they’re choosing to mythologise and this… just doesn’t.
I suspect it’s a me + book (like, I’m sure some of the London ones are just as bad, it’s just that I know enough about London), but hey, it’s the big takeaway I’ve come away with.
But I do have some other points. The first is pacing – I swear about two thirds of the book was setup, and my god that setup felt slow. I felt like I spent far, far longer reading the first 20% than I did the last 50%, because it was just drudgey, and took so much time to pick up the pace, at such small increments… it felt like a long, looooong book. Which is generally not my experience with urban fantasy, making it particularly grating.
The other issue, which somewhat feeds into the slowness is that I just failed to connect to any of the characters. Like with the Broken Earth series, I can see why, logically, they are interesting characters, but something about them just failed to click with me, there was never that real sense of connection, that really makes things come alive. That spark, more than anything, tends to be what pushes me through a book, what makes it sing… and without it, especially in something so slow… I’d really need to be there for the enjoyment of the setting, and well… see above.
Basically, it all compounded together to make what should have been a pacey, engaging read into something treacley and dull, and just a solid meh. I dithered between two and three stars for it, and settled on two mainly because I very much believe that Mexican Gothic (to which I gave three) is a noticeably better book.
So my Nebula rankings run thus:
1 – Piranesi
2 – Mexican Gothic
3 – The City We Became
4 – All Systems Red (standing for Murderbot in general)
5 – Black Sun
I dithered somewhat about where to fit it in, if I’m honest. If I had to read one of them again, I think I’d reread Black Sun first… but I think a lot of that was because it was that much of a quicker, easier read, so it would be a less painful experience, not on the quality of the book. There’s very little, for me, in between City and Murderbot. They’re both extremely, extremely meh books. But now I’m examining that, I’m finding City juuuust nudges above, in my estimation… but I gave Murderbot a 3… so City gets a 3, but a low, resentful 3 as I update Goodreads now. There’s a pretty big gap between 1 and 2, and between 2 and 3.
I have one book left to read to complete the Nebulas (The Midnight Bargain by C. L. Polk), but I’m not enormously looking forward to it, so I’m allowing myself a couple of fun books in between (The Old Guard vol 2 and Pandora’s Jar by Natalie Haynes).
We also now have the Hugo shortlist (ordered according to my preference on the ones I’ve read), which is unsurprisingly similar to the Nebulas, with one notable (and extremely welcome, nay, necessary, addition):
1 – Harrow the Ninth
2 – Piranesi
3 – The City We Became
4 – All Systems Red (standing for Murderbot in general)
5 – Black Sun
? – The Relentless Moon
I haven’t yet read The Relentless Moon, and as it’s the third in the Lady Astronaut series, I need to decide if I’m going to read the middle one first. I am led to believe one does not strictly need to, which appeals to the side of me that thought the first book in the series was cringey crap, but we do already own it, which appeals to the completionist in me, especially as I’m chickening out of reading the actual Murderbot novel. I do at least have until December to decide, because the Hugos are weird this year. I doubt I’ll be in much of a rush.
While I’m extremely glad Harrow has made it into the list here, I am somewhat disappointed in the rest of it. There are several genuinely good novels, or at least novels better than those in the shortlist, that have been missed off (though at least The Unspoken Name gets a nod because A. K. Larkwood is up for the Astounding), but then again, I’d already read those.
Also, despite a concerted effort to read more novellas and pay some attention to short stories this year, the venn diagram of “what I have read” and “the shortlist” hasn’t got an enormous overlap, which does at least mean the voter packet is going to be big chunk of reading for me whenever it comes through. I’m also already invested in several things winning in non-novel categories (Once and Future is so good and deserves so much love, and I’m so so glad The Old Guard is up for dramatic presentation), so maybe this year I’ll spread my obsession around, rather than focussing all my disappointment into one place.
*I was amused that the pancake place opposite my old work came up in Rivers of London.
** I can name you “bits” of New York, but I’m not sure which ones are boroughs (or what that means in terms of New York politically/culturally) and which are neihgbourhoods or something else entirely. I very well might have guessed things like “Harlem” or “Hell’s Kitchen” or “SoHo” because *expansive shrugging*.
A Reader of Else 