![]() As the avatars embodying New York City’s various boroughs investigate the Woman in White, they discover that she is using a nonprofit called the Better New York Foundation-itself owned by a mysterious global company called TOTAL MULTIVERSAL WAR, LLC-to gentrify various parts of the city: stealing Brooklyn brownstones from its original owners, Brooklyn Thomason and her family pressuring Bronx art gallery director Bronca Siwanoy to take down photographs of local graffiti and put up pretentious, racist art by white men razing a long-standing Bronx burger restaurant and evicting the people who lived above it to build expensive condos and so on. ![]() After fighting the Woman in White, New York City’s avatar falls into a coma-which, mysteriously, causes each of the city’s boroughs to choose an avatar of its own. New York City is in the process of being born when extradimensional aliens, bent on preventing cities from coming alive, send an emissary known as the Woman in White to sabotage New York City’s birth. In the novel, great cities that “develop a unique enough culture” eventually come to life and choose a human avatar from among their residents to embody them. ![]() The City We Became, a science-fiction novel, uses an extradimensional alien invasion of New York City to show how gentrification makes cities depressingly homogenous and destroys the idiosyncratic lifestyles they can offer residents. ![]()
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