Dhe charm of songs and novels always lies in the fact that no writer or singer can forbid you to understand a work in a completely different way than they meant it. Sometimes it is even impossible for a text to have inscribed the message that one thinks one can read from its author. This is how you read the first chapters of “The Guardians of New York” and think: Wow, that must be this Corona novel that they always talked about in the cultural programs at the beginning of the pandemic. But then you realize: The book was published in the United States in March 2020, exactly for the first nationwide lockdown. Its author couldn’t have known how well the original title “The City We Became” suddenly fitted her beloved New York at the moment of publication, which was shocked to realize that even this city sleeps after all.
The author NK Jemisin has so far not let her stories take place on earth and in the present, even if dangers for the earth such as the climate catastrophe in her fantasy trilogy “Broken Earth” already appeared in the title. With the series, Jemisin, who worked as a psychologist prior to her literary success, became the first African-American author to win the Hugo Award, the most prestigious award for English-language science fiction, and the first person to win the award in three years in a row. Her new book was a “chance to allow myself a little monstrous fun, after the weight of the Broken Earth saga.” For the first time, Jemisin doesn’t create a new world in the future – “The New York Guard” is set in a New York without Covid with normally crazy New Yorkers as superheroes.
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The story begins when New York comes alive. And not as a metaphor of some morning – in Jemisin’s world, cities of a certain size take on a life of their own, and these organisms give birth to human avatars as a sort of patron saint of the city. São Paulo, for example, is embodied by a slim, brown-skinned chain smoker, while Hong Kong is an old, hard-nosed man in a suit. New York is still seeking embodiment, and at this stage is particularly vulnerable to the enemy, an IT-like primordial monster that can take any form. It thrashes the Brooklyn Bridge with its tentacles, swells out of subway tunnels as a gelatinous mass, crawls into cops and turns them into remote-controlled deputies – and again and again evil manifests itself in the mysterious White Woman aka Dr. White. In short, strange things are happening.
About the white mass
Following a classic hero story structure, NK Jemisin lets her chosen ones first learn that they are chosen, what super powers they have, who supports them and who their opponents are. New York wouldn’t be the self-proclaimed best city in the world if it only had a patron saint—each of the five neighborhoods has one. There’s Brooklyn, a former rapper, single mom, and city councilwoman. Bronca, an indigenous lesbian curator in her sixties. Tamil math genius Padmini, student in and embodiment of Queens. Aislyn, the only white person, represents Staten Island and has the superpower of turning invisible as a nod to the forgotten part of town. Manny is a queer black and violent charmer with a special status among the five because he embodies the center of power Manhattan. If these characters overcome their rivalries, perhaps they can defeat the formless monster and, as a super team, awaken the true city avatar of all of New York.
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