Blackfish City
Sam J. Miller
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Blackfish City
Sam J. Miller
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
This has the look and feel of science fiction, but the novel tells a timeless story of rebellion against a corrupt master, giving it a kind of Hunger Games resonance that reaches beyond any genre boundaries. Miller is a graceful writer, easing us into the story gently, letting us get acclimated to its time and place, before subtly speeding up the pace and plunging us into the characters’ race for survival. And what fine characters they are: people of the future, yes, but with all the texture and believability of ordinary folk..
Miller has written an urgent tale imploring us to look at the ties between technology, race, gender and class privilege. Still, the novel is surprisingly heartwarming. Ultimately, Blackfish is a book about power structures and the way that privilege is built on the backs of the disenfranchised — wrapped in an action-packed science fiction thriller..
Miller has woven a number of pressing contemporary concerns—homelessness, wealth inequality, political corruption, familial bonds, the AIDS epidemic—into the fabric of Qaanaaq, the floating city. Though it has a fast-paced and intriguing political plot, Blackfish City is a novel driven in large part by its conceptual and thematic frameworks. The bits I found most engaging were often the intimate sketches Miller gives of his characters’ interactions with their world. While all of our narrators technically inhabit the same city, the vast gaps in wealth, role, and experience between them make it seem as if they’re all aliens to one another.
Blackfish City is an eco-punk thriller with startling implications for how climate change, technology, and the political machinations of the mega-rich could dramatically alter our future (even if our reality is likely to included fewer orcamacers). It may seem overtly fantastical, but this imaginary world is very much rooted in our current culture and climate (in both senses of the word). Sam J. Miller’s sophomore effort proves him a writer with real potential. Best to start here, and prepare yourself for many more strange journeys at his side..
These days, we tend to label almost any future city as dystopian, but the term hardly does justice to Miller’s complex society.
Blackfish City...establishes a dystopian world that stands apart in a crowded field.
In Blackfish City, Sam J. Miller creates a vivid, if daunting and dystopian, future after climate change has so ravaged the world that the great powers have fallen and nearly everyone is a refugee. Themes like hybridity and diaspora, alienation and found family, greed, religious intolerance and genocide, class struggle, revenge, and rebellion are all seamlessly woven together in a tale told in the floating Arctic city of Qaanaaq, a city peopled with refugees, run by artificial intelligence, and owned by the mega-wealthy.
Miller, fresh from his YA debut (The Art of Starving), makes the jump to adult SF with an ambitious, imaginative, and big-hearted dystopian ensemble story that’s by turns elegiac and angry.