The City We Became (Great Cities, #1)

by N.K. Jemisin

Whole villages of Lenape were driven away from the city and its immediate vicinity by the Dutch; how many of them died in the process? How much blood and fear has soaked into this old bedrock?

Grandmaster Flash could save me from the invisible feather monsters.

She turns to Strawberry Manbun, who’s watching her with an overly polite, fuck-you smile on his lips. He knows full well what she’s thinking. He’s waiting for her to say it out loud and violate the unspoken contract that covers white people who are doing everything short of tossing around the n-word in public.

These kinds of people always lie, and attack others, to cover their mediocrity.

“Yeah. That was H. P. Lovecraft’s fun little label for folks in Chinatown—sorry, ‘Asiatic filth.’ He was willing to concede that they might be as intelligent as white people because they knew how to make a buck. But he didn’t think they had souls.”

Black people were ‘childlike half-gorillas,’ Jews were a curse, the Portuguese were ‘simian,’ whatever. We had a lot of fun deconstructing that one in my thesis seminar.”

HP Lovecraft letter

Picasso stole from African artists and Gauguin was a pedo who gave a bunch of brown girls syphilis,

truth, sad but true

“White dude whining as a growth industry,”

It’s now cos-playing masculinity. See Punisher stickers on large pickup trucks & Jeeps.

She should be fixated right now on buying unnecessary cute stuff for her future grandson, granddaughter, or two-spirit child, but here she is up to her neck in otherworldly art attacks.

So think again before you ever try to pass Brooklyn.

But these people are always gonna tell themselves that a little fascism is okay as long as they can still get unlimited drinks with brunch!”

So LA!

“Skippy the tentacle monster sends her little bigot fuckbois to harass you on the internet? Like, is that how Lovecraftian horror works now, because… I can’t…”

All the other worlds that human beings believe in, via group myths or spiritual visitations or even imaginations if they’re vivid enough, they exist. Imagining a world creates it, if it isn’t already there. That’s the great secret of existence: it’s supersensitive to thought. Decisions, wishes, lies—that’s all you need to create a new universe. Every human being on this planet spins off thousands between birth and death, although there’s something about the way our minds work that keeps us from noticing. In every moment, we’re constantly moving in multiple dimensions—we think we’re sitting still, but we’re actually falling from one universe to the next to the next, so fast that it all blends together, like… like animation. Except there’s a lot more than just images flipping past.”

broccoliesque

“Can’t you get there on the 6 train, when it turns around?” Veneza asks Brooklyn. “Tourists do it all the time. I did it once.” “Yeah, but they don’t let you out of the train. It doesn’t even stop.”

Old city hall.subway stop