Cassie McCullough

So there's the young man who Cassie talked about who can't remember his name.

He calls himself Manny and he represents the island of Manhattan.

So, Chris Flynn, if we go back to the world of the book rather than the world of New York, who are the characters that drive it?

So, Denise, when we look at these characters, how important, and I'm thinking as an idea in speculative fiction broadly, not just in this novel, how important is it that Jemisin has made these figures Native American, African American, biracial, migrant women?

What does that tell us about what she's doing as a writer?

And Cassie, one of the things that interested me about that was other books that you and I have talked about on air that also have this sense of place that becomes personified.

And even Max Porter's Lanny did that with the character of dead puppet Toothwort who sort of took all of the voices and the history of that small village.

Yeah, and even Neil Gaiman's American Gods, the new migrant history of America, created its own gods.

So I guess one of the things we have to be careful about in talking about this book is to talk about the fictional world she's creating and what these cities are doing and not just the actual...

place that is new york because in the story as these cities are born as they become sentient some of them fail and so they talk about ancient the ancient city of atlantis but they also talk about um hurricane katrina

And they talk about New Orleans as one of the cities that tried to become sentient and it didn't work.

And Port-au-Prince in Haiti.

So there's a whole process.

And important to the story, the last city that had been born and that had started to breathe and become a being has to midwife the next city.

And so the last city that had been born in this fantasy universe was Sao Paulo, Brazil.

And so the character of San Paolo is also walking through New York, finding these avatars and saying, hey, guys, you have to work together to give birth to this city.

But Cassie, shall we talk about the monsters?

I mean, Chris has already alluded to this terrible Lovecraftian threat.

So shall we move towards some giant tentacles?

Yeah.