N. K. Jemisin

Untitled Jemisin 2

Jeremy Wang

3.5 alright???? ok first let me just acknowledge: nk jemisin's creative powers and ability to draw entirely unexpected analogies are just simply unmatched. oh man, the number of times i stopped in the final third of this book to just marvel at her ideas (artistic creativity turned darwinian evolution, "the simulation hypothesis" turned lovecraftian, inter-city history manifesting in personal dynamics). i love her. 

aaaaand now for some caveats: PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE STOP TALKING ABOUT MATH NORA. i get it, you don't want to entirely hand-wave your brilliant ideas into fantasy, but if you're going to bring math into your whole multiversal quantum physics endeavor, please for the love of God talk to some actual physicists or mathematicians (yes, even if they happen to be *gasp* WHITE, but also look the world is progressing, there are considerable numbers of BIPOC people and women in math/physics these days) so you can base your work on something more sophisticated than graphing parabolas. if i have to read one more trailing...ellipsis...sentence...because...you...don't...know...enough...math...to...finish...your...thoughts... i will actually bust an aneurysm. yes, vector fields have to do with geometry and in some vague sense even what you imagine to be non-euclidean geometry, but my goodness they are not what you think they are. every padmini POV experience is a mix of overwhelming love and CRINGECRINGECRINGE.

have you noticed? i'm writing so f r e e l y, and i have nk to thank for that. her writing in this book is as raw and visceral as ever, and i think it can't help but inspire the reader to be similarly uninhibited. considering the pervasive theme of unbridled self-expression and freedom, it's quite fitting. also, her characters just shimmer with delightful idiosyncrasies. sometimes, i felt like the large cast was a little stifling, so that i never really got the best feel for bronca and veneza, but man did i love brooklyn and manny and padmini and neek. they read so real. 

sorry, have to interrupt the fanboy to make a few more measured remarks: i respect that jemisin is a Black woman who has decided (justifiably!) to tie her work inextricably to race. but i also can't help feeling that, given the grand scale of the novel, the heavy, heavy emphasis on racial and political dimensions in passages about oppression, uniformizing gentrification, and other topics somehow detracted ever so slightly from the intellectual potential of the novel. not really a problem in the end, since her approach lends a more intense emotional bent to the plot, and these dimensions obviously do exist! i just wasn't the biggest fan. a little weird for the most alien entity one could ever imagine to focus almost exclusively on allying with racist bigots (i mean jemisin even makes a global evil megacorp; where's the emphasis on that??). i know lovecraft did it first, but we can all agree lovecraft was himself a racist bigot that we don't want to emulate thanks

and i could feel the waning of creative energy that jemisin mentions in her acknowledgments. the plot drew to a close much too quickly and relied on a number of deus ex machinas (chief among them more PSEUDOMATH UGH). obviously i am nowhere near as creative as her, so take everything i say with a grain of salt, but i did feel that we could have fleshed out more of the final ur arc. still a great story though!

i can't help returning to jemisin's choice of morality. it's so strange, because her depiction of R'lyeh ends up being so nuanced, but she has a curiously flat perspective on, y'know, Earthly morals. aside from the one pizza scene, jemisin seems to be pretty much uniformly against any kind of homogenization and scale. look, i understand the sentiment; i love independent art and thought and bookstores and political campaigns as much as the next person, but i really don't think that a world where all corporatization vanishes is actually a world anyone wants to live in. ditto for some other matters of race and politics. but also i understand, jemisin is righteously angry, so it's fine in the end.

anyway, this is probably the longest review i've ever written, but only because this book is so complex and interesting. please discuss it with me!

Boothby

** spoiler alert **
           Mixed feelings. I love the main avatars, and the introductions of new cities was fun. But the story got lost in the weeds, bogged down by exposition about a) running for mayor b) handwavy multiverse stuff. The finale was still fun (mostly), so if you liked the first, I'd still recommend finishing the series! There's just a lot storywise that felt underdeveloped?

We get fewer of the construct fights that were so fun in the first book, which makes sense since we find our fearless avatars locked into a holding pattern with R'lyeh at the beginning of the book. But I feel we're also missing the tension of a barely contained cold war since we're keeping busy with Brooklyn's run for mayor, which basically runs smoothly (?) aside from a few dangerous confrontations with right wing demonstrations, which are each handled within a chapter. 

The mayoral race is the proxy battle for new York against the kind of racist backlash movement we're familiar with, so that part hits close to home (Jemisin mentions in the acknowledgements that it was really emotionally difficult to write). However, it still feels like a missed opportunity that the campaign narrative was so....ordinary. We spend a lot of time reading about funding and donors, data analysis and graphic design and campaign ads. A lot of the genius in the first book was the use of constructs as a purely vibes based magic. Why not take advantage of that as the engine to make the campaign work without bogged down in the ordinary minutiae of a regular political campaign. Why were so many of the big moments in the campaign something going viral online? 

Also, we get a lot of Padmini doing exposition about the multiverse, even in the finale? I don't think it needs to be explained that much--in fact, explain as little as possible because it makes less sense the more you try! After an amazing battle for the soul of New York the final resolution hinges on... a conversation with the evil overlords at the center of the universe where Padmini et al. basically convince them that it's impossible to crush the human spirit? That was a let down to me--speaking to the manager as a climax. 

But still!!! So much to love here--all the people and ideas from the first book are still there, and the experience of actually reading this is that I was just happy to hang out and watch everyone do their thing. This duology is wildly and triumphantly original and heartfelt.

Untitled Jemisin 2

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