
City on Fire
HOW SPECIAL is New York City? Is it the greatest, most exciting, most alive-seeming city on the North American continent? If you think so, would you say as much to people who live in Los Angeles, or Montreal? Would you build a large-scale, world-shaping fantasy series around the idea?
N. K. Jemisin did. Her ambitious, historically conscious, almost perfectly executed Broken Earth trilogy (2015–17) won a stack of awards, including three fan-voted Hugos in a row (the first author to accomplish that hat trick). Its thousand-plus pages incorporated mutant superpowers, geological upheavals, devices