Held under a certain light, N. K. Jemisin’s 2020 science fiction novel, The City We Became, picks up where Nell Zink leaves off. The book starts with, as one of the protagonists describes it, a picture of “Weird New York” in the days immediately leading up to and during a siege of the city by a Lovecraftian entity who is attempting to destroy it (32; emphasis in original). The plot of The City We Became is strange and complex, turning around a central conceit that cities are born into existence through individual surrogates who are made to represent each city. We start as New York is struggling to be born and the city’s surrogate has only narrowly escaped defeat in a fight against a nebulous enemy, the Woman in White and her minions, a set of man-bun-donning provocateurs – the type who love craft beer, but would also be the first to line up for a slot on a Tucker Carlson broadcast. The New York surrogate (whose name is simply New York) is now hiding in a forgotten subway tunnel, only barely breathing. But New York, unlike the other city surrogates in the novel, is unique in that the city has a surrogate for the city as a whole and each borough has an individual stand-in.