“Come, then, City That Never Sleeps. Let me show you what lurks in the empty spaces where nightmares dare not tread.”
The Urban Fantasy duology Great Cities, by N. K. Jemisin, consists of
- "The City Born Great"
(2016) was a short story mostly reworked into the first chapter of The City We Became - The City We Became (2020)
- The World We Make (2022)
It takes place in a world where great cities acquire sentience through human avatars. In New York City, a group of avatars of New York, each representing their respective five boroughs (Manhattan, Brooklyn, Bronx, Queens and Staten Island) as well as of the whole city New York City as a whole emerges to face a supernatural threat.
Tropes in both books:
- Alien Geometries: As befitting a story where R'lyeh shows up. A mere glimpse is frightening enough to break down the normally unshakeable Veneza.
- Discussed on a Tumblr post that Padmini reads, which jokes about how Lovecraft portrayed non-Euclidean geometry as scary when to people familiar with math it's actually completely harmless.
- Alike and Antithetical Adversaries: The diverse main cast, representing New York, is contrasted with the uniformity of the Enemy which tries to make cities more uniform, and the Woman in White always appears as a white woman as well as being the Anthropomorphic Personification of a scarily uniform city herself.
- Ambiguously Brown: Manny does have a specific ethnicity (Black American), but looks Ambiguously Brown and appears to be used to fielding questions about his heritage. A notable aspect of his appearance that Bronca picks up on is that he's perceived to be whatever race other people he's talking to are, which is implied to be an expression of Manhattan itself: not only very multi-cultural, but its more predatory elements can win you to their side by making you think, "he's okay. He's one of us". Hell, when he goes to visit the avatar of Tokyo in the second book, she immediately perceives him to be half-Japanese.
- Anthropomorphic Personification: The five boroughs of New York and New York city as a whole are incarnated into six avatars that represent their social essence.
- Apocalypse How: The Woman in White intends to create a class X-5 with her city imposing on New York destroying this universe and several others connecting to it. A class X-5 also happens every time a city is born, "tearing through" universes and destroying thousands of them.
- Been There, Shaped History: Hurricane Katrina and the botching of the government response were influenced, if not caused by, the Woman in White, as a way to make it easier to kill New Orleans. The same goes for the 2010 Haiti Earthquake and the birth of Port-au-Prince.
- Big Applesauce: The story is set in New York.
- Brutal Honesty: The Woman In White makes no secret of the fact that she considers humans, and especially cities, to be abominations; that she intends to destroy the city and use it as a stepping stone to destroy the universe; and that the only reward for allying with her is to die last and more peacefully. Staten Island hates the rest of the City too much to care.
- Cast of Personifications: The main characters embody social and historical aspects of New York and its boroughs:
- Bronca is an older boisterous Lenape artist, embodying the first inhabitants of New York and the scrappy, artsy side of the Bronx.
- Brooklyn is a black middle-aged lawyer and city councilwoman who was once a rapper. She embodies both the bohemian past of Brooklyn and its current gentrification.
- Padmini is a 25-year-old Tamil immigrant graduate student, reflecting the multiculturalism of Queens. She's implied to be Dalit (of the lowest caste), so she also embodies the desires of immigrants to start over in a place with more opportunity.
- Manny is smartly dressed and ruthless, embodying the business-focused mentality of Manhattan. Much like Manhattan itself, he's just ambiguous enough to reflect whatever the person looking at him expects to see.
- Aislyn is a timid and mousy white woman afraid of the other, bigger, boroughs, reflecting the whiter and more conservative lean of Staten Island.
- Veneza hangs around the other avatars for most of the book despite not being one of them. At the climax, she becomes the personification of Jersey City, small and scrappy but daring the rest of New York to say it doesn't belong.
- Cast Full of Gay: Most characters are LGBTQI.
- Combat Pragmatist: The Enemy never kept to the rules of engagement it had supposedly agreed to with the cities, and even set up a multinational corporation whose purpose is to destroy cities' individuality so they might never be born, or to weaken and sabotage them if they are. The older cities come to suspect that this is how it arranged the assassination of the avatar of New Orleans.
- Dark and Troubled Past: Manny is very, very strongly implied to have one of these, although his amnesia makes it difficult to say just how much. Even meeting his mother in the second book doesn't shed any light on this.
- Did We Just Have Tea with Cthulhu?: Aislyn thinks of The Woman in White as a friend. She's even a fan of tea.
- Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Subverted. The heroes beat the abominations with physical violence several times, but being city avatars, they're halfway to being eldritch abominations themselves.
- Dirty Cop: Aislyn's father arrests someone and charges them with assault for no other reason than they were the wrong color and in his wrong neighborhood.
- Eldritch Abomination: The Enemy is explicitly and repeatedly called one, word for word. It is an immense, ancient horror from an incomprehensible universe, and it has nothing but ill will for cities and humanity in general. It manifests on Earth in a variety of forms, including feathery white tendrils of various sizes, two-dimensional spider monsters, and - most prominently - the Woman in White. Fittingly, the Enemy turns out to be the avatar of the city of R'lyeh.
- Everyone Has Standards: It's strongly implied that even the NYPD find Aislyn's father's behavior unacceptable, which is why he has no friends at work and hasn't made detective despite thirty years of trying. We also learn that at least a few NYPD officers (notably, the women) are on the side of the City.
- Expendable Alternate Universe: Thousands of alternate universes are destroyed when a city is born. While the main characters had no way of preventing this from happening with the birth of New York, they still decide pretty quickly that it's worth it and make no attempt to prevent it from happening again.
- Five-Token Band: Befitting the ethnic and cultural diversity of New York City. Also played with as the main cast has no White Male Lead like the usual iterations of this trope.
- Genius Loci: The main characters are this to New York and its boroughs. In fact, all the major cities in this world get one or several: Sao Paolo and Hong Kong are secondary characters in the first book, and the second book introduces a whole host of these, notably London, Tokyo, Paris, Istanbul, Faiyum and even Atlantis. The Woman in White is also one - namely, R'lyeh.
- Greater-Scope Villain: The Woman in White has a "board" she must answer to.
- Humanoid Abomination: The Woman in White appears to be a white (Caucasian) woman with white hair and all-white clothing, but she doesn't even bother hiding that she's something utterly inhuman and alien. Her other features vary considerably between appearances, and is once described as having unnatural and unsettling beauty. She is an avatar of the Enemy, and R'lyeh contains many Women in White.
- Light Is Not Good: Everything associated with the Enemy is a stark, stale white.
- Meaningful Name: Several of the avatars have names that sound like their borough's name—or, in Brooklyn's case, just have exactly the same name.
- Ms. Exposition: Because Bronca's the oldest, New York decides she's the one who can handle knowing all the background information, so she has to tell the others how stuff works.
- The Nameless: Manhattan. He does actually learn his true name, but refuses to acknowledge it throughout the books (so far), and the reader never learns what it is.
- Not-So-Omniscient Council of Bickering: There is a Summit composed of all the cities on Earth that survived their awakenings. Disagreements among their ranks prevented them from mounting an effective resistance to the Enemy's changing tactics.
- Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist: The Enemy initially says she wants to stop cities from becoming alive and destroying multiple inhabited universes each time. If she has to exploit human bigotries and cause smaller massacres in the process, and cripple humanity's social development, so be it. By the endgame, she makes it clear that she simply considers humans and their cities to be abominations, and she intends to destroy not just the universe where the story is taking place, but every universe connected to it.
- Obfuscating Stupidity: The Enemy has spent millennia pretending to be a rampaging beast so the cities don't recognize its ability to plan ahead and weaken cities before they're born.
- Obliviously Evil: The birth of a city collapses thousands of realities into non-existence, killing trillions of people or even rendering them Deader than Dead. But there is no way for the avatars of the city to know this until after the city is born.
- Personal Hate Before Common Goals: The Enemy openly declares that she's there to destroy the universe. Staten Island wants to see the other boroughs go to Hell so badly that she's okay with this.
- Personality Powers: The avatars battle using "constructs"—abstract ideas that have real existence in cityspace. Each avatar's preferred constructs influence their fighting style.
- Brooklyn is a former MC who defeats monsters with literal rap battles.
- Bronca has fought all her life by running up to bigger, stronger opponents and kicking them before they expect anything. As an avatar, she's always wearing her "boots."
- Aislyn is so timid that she commands a Perception Filter.
- Padmini is a graduate student that uses mental mathematical equations to shape reality.
- Manny is able to hold off the eldritch abominations by literally buying the land they're standing on. He's also able to summon a subway train construct more than once to make an escape (most people who live or work in Manhattan famously don't drive), and when facing down the monster sent to destroy Neek, transforms into none other than King Kong, renowned for his rampage through the borough that, of course, ended at Manhattan's most famous landmark, the Empire State Building.
- Politically Incorrect Villain: While the Woman in White is too inhuman to properly feel mortal prejudices (she's good at Fantastic Racism, though), bigots are easier for her to influence than most, so she cheerfully plays to any and all kinds of -isms to get what she wants.
- Public Domain Character: At the climax, Manhattan briefly takes the form of King Kong.
- Refusal of the Call: Bronca and Aislyn are both reluctant to join the rest of the city despite their powers calling to them to do so.
- Ret-Gone: One of the possible fates for New York if the avatars lose—the Woman in White destroyed Atlantis so completely that it never existed in the first place.
- Steven Ulysses Perhero: Brooklyn, Bronca and Aislyn all have names that sound like the borough they will later end up represented, although Manny's name is a Line-of-Sight Name he created for himself due to his amnesia and not the name he was born with.
- Tentacled Terror: The soldiers of the Enemy frequently sport the classic writhing tentacles. It's hinted that they intentionally took on the Lovecraft look to distract the Cities from the Enemy's newer, subtler tactics.
- Villainous Gentrification: A tool of the Woman in White. By putting up generic chain stores and pricing out the population and their original culture, she saps the "character" from cities and weakens their power. Becomes very literal near the climax when a race to Staten Island must go through a gauntlet of Starbucks franchises-turned-Eldritch Abominations.
- White Male Lead: Averted with the main cast. In fact, being a straight white male is a good sign of being on the side of evil.
- Lampshaded when Hong addresses Manny upon first meeting the avatars, assuming that the only man among them must be the leader.
- Your Mind Makes It Real: People have the power to create new universes with their thoughts, either from cultural constructs or even just one person's imagination being strong enough.
