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    Blackfish City: A Novel
    Blackfish City: A Novel
    Blackfish City: A Novel
    Ebook366 pages5 hours

    Blackfish City: A Novel

    By Sam J. Miller

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    “One of the most intriguing future cities in years.” —Charlie Jane Anders

    “Simmers with menace and heartache, suspense and wonder.” —Ann Leckie

    A Best Book of the Month in

    Entertainment Weekly

    The Washington Post

    Tor.com

    B&N Sci-Fi Fantasy Blog

    Amazon

    After the climate wars, a floating city is constructed in the Arctic Circle, a remarkable feat of mechanical and social engineering, complete with geothermal heating and sustainable energy. The city’s denizens have become accustomed to a roughshod new way of living, however, the city is starting to fray along the edges—crime and corruption have set in, the contradictions of incredible wealth alongside direst poverty are spawning unrest, and a new disease called “the breaks” is ravaging the population.

    When a strange new visitor arrives—a woman riding an orca, with a polar bear at her side—the city is entranced. The “orcamancer,” as she’s known, very subtly brings together four people—each living on the periphery—to stage unprecedented acts of resistance. By banding together to save their city before it crumbles under the weight of its own decay, they will learn shocking truths about themselves. 

    Blackfish City is a remarkably urgent—and ultimately very hopeful—novel about political corruption, organized crime, technology run amok, the consequences of climate change, gender identity, and the unifying power of human connection. 

     

    Editor's Note

    City without a map…

    The city of Qaanaaq becomes a character in and of itself in this quirky dystopian about climate change and many other ills of late capitalism. Rumors of a woman traveling with an orca and polar bear bring four disparate people together for a strange adventure.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateApr 17, 2018
    ISBN9780062684844
    Author

    Sam J. Miller

    Sam J. Miller is the Nebula-Award-winning author of The Art of Starving (an NPR best of the year) and Blackfish City (a best book of the year for Vulture, Entertainment Weekly, and more). A recipient of the Shirley Jackson Award and a graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, Sam's short stories have been nominated for the World Fantasy, Theodore Sturgeon, and Locus Awards, and reprinted in dozens of anthologies. A community organizer by day, he lives in New York City.

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    Reviews for Blackfish City

    3.5/5

    210 ratings10 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Loved the world building, didn't like the ending..... at all. (But it was not my story to tell)
      Still worth a read and the COVER GLOWS IN THE DARK... Just an FYI
    • 5/5
      Great job author, I really like your writing style. I suggest you join Novel Star’s writing competition on April.
    • 3/5
      I wanted to like this book more, but it never reached a point where the book completely gelled to me. I know this is going to sound strange, but it almost felt too short. Momentous events happened suddenly, and it felt like the characters didn't earn the things that happened to them. There was a lot of characters being in the right place at the right time. This book was definitely character driven, but I never felt more than a cursory attachment to them. If a book's plot isn't going to keep my turning pages, then the characters have to be up to some interesting stuff. Sometimes they were, but this book was really more about the city. Qaanaaq is a very interesting place, and I loved exploring it. The city could live alongside other famous scifi cities, it is definitely that unique. Its an awful dystopia, and I wouldn't want to live there, but it was interesting to read about. There were other good ideas in this book, especially the idea that AIs and programs did most of the governing, and that political power is not held by people as much because it was too easy to manipulate people in positions of power. I felt like the ending was also a little abrupt and would have loved to have a small denouement for the characters. Overall, good concepts, fairly interesting characters, if a little shallow, but never quite gelled for me.
    • 3/5
      2.5 stars. Good ideas mixed up with too much preaching mixed up by a POV switch every 2 pages (literally, the book jumps POV like 125 or 150 or maybe more times, sometimes after only a page) mixed up with not-at-all-scifi-actually-just-techno-fantasy. It's like... the Johnny Mnemonic (movie) crossed with His Dark Materials crossed with... some environmental fiction.

      So potentially good, but this book failed for me in many ways. The city is interesting, but the world behind it is annoyingly unconvincing in all the wrong spots. I suspect the author doesn't have a lot of familiarity with science, tech, or e.g. real climate model predictions. These characters all come together... magically. In all seriousness, it might have worked better if they just had a "destiny" to fulfill, a prophecy was foretold, etc.
    • 4/5
      Series Info/Source: This is a stand alone book. I borrowed this on audiobook from the library.Thoughts: I enjoyed this, it is a bit of an odd book. Originally you hear from a bunch of different POVs that don't seem to be related. I enjoyed the setting though and how the story ends up coming together.We hear from a number of different POVs throughout the book. There are four main ones I think. All of these people live in a city that floats in the ocean in the Arctic Circle. After horrible climate events, this city is one of the remaining places to escape to and live. Unfortunately, a new disease called "the breaks" is tearing through the population. People with the breaks start to disassociate with reality and have mental confusion as they see past events through other people's eyes. Initially we are just following these characters through their day to day lives but then a woman riding an orca appears and as she starts to integrate herself into events around the city, it brings together the people whose POV we are reading from in an intriguing way.I loved the post-apocalyptic setting that blends both cyberpunk elements and climate change crisis elements. The cyberpunk elements are definitely there in the bleakness of the city, the body modifications, and the general despair of the populace. I also really enjoyed how the different story threads, that at first seem unrelated, tie together so well in the end.Weak points of the story for me were the characterization and pacing. I didn't love these characters and I struggled to engage with them, but they were still interesting. The story starts slow and is a bit confusing at first but really picks up pace at the end. I am glad I stuck with this to the end. I listened to this on audiobook and the narration was very well done (Adam is a great narrator). Oh and I love the cover for this book, it really grabs your attention and embodies the feel of the story well.My Summary (4/5): Overall I liked this book. The unique setting, cyberpunk elements, climate crisis elements, and plague elements were well done. I enjoyed how all the different story threads came together in the end. This was a bit weak on characterization and the pacing was sluggish in the beginning but picked up towards the end. I would recommend to those who enjoy strange post-apocalyptic cyberpunk reads...or are just looking for something a bit different to pick up.
    • 3/5
      I'm fond of stories where seemingly unrelated perspectives converge and then snap together in the final beats. The mystery aspect about the breaks illness wasn't deep or complex, but the concept itself is fascinating. While I cannot say I could relate to the characters, many of them were interesting and so I enjoyed witnessing the city through their eyes. I'd have liked to know more about the city, but it's not like that is a missing part of the story, since the focus is on the characters and their interactions, rather than on the compelling sci-fi setting.
    • 5/5
      This is a delightful read. The investment you make in the first 100 pages pays off in a rich, enfolding experience of very able, capable worldbuilding by Author Miller.Four PoV characters seems like a lot, I know, but each presents the reader with a different lens on a world that is all about where you are in its hierarchy as to what it looks like, feels like, and how Qaanaaq functions to meet your needs. Wealthy and privileged and bored Fill and Kaev, males at opposite ends of the city's caste system, and Kaev the professional fight-thrower is about to slip a few more rungs down the ladder. Ankit and non-binary Soq are the mobile middle-dwellers, each functioning in their differing-status jobs to support the power structure. Soq the messenger, the Mercury of Qaanaaq, was probably my favorite PoV in the book. The stealth they possess; the invisibility that rejecting binaries confers on them; all the moments of revelation this leads to make them a character I'd've loved to hear more from.Author Miller is a top-notch talent, a maker of archetypes and a weaver of worlds whose skills are already as sharp as many with much longer résumés. What points of complaint I have are negligible compared to the central, overarching concerns he presents in this three-year-old and already timeless title.Some of my favorite lines:Money is a mind, the oldest artificial intelligence. Its prime directives are simple, it's programming endlessly creative. Humans obey it unthinkingly, with cheerful alacrity. Like a virus, it doesn't care if it kills its host. It will simply flow on to someone new.–and–The American fleet had lacked a lot of things—food, shelter, fuel, civil liberties—but it hadn’t lacked weapons. The global military presence that had made the pre-fall United States so powerful, and then helped cause their collapse, had left them with all sorts of terrifying toys.–and–“Fine line between good business and a fucking war crime,” he said. “Ain’t that the goddamn epitaph of capitalism.”
    • 3/5
      Read this book for my f2f bookclub. It is a dystopia book written by Sam J. Miller and is set in the near future after a climate and techno disaster destroys most of the world. People are living on this floating object in the arctic circle area. It is science fiction involving nanobonding (people to animals) and bots, AI, etc and like a lot of SF it addresses current cultural issues of capitalism, the right to own property, and genders/pronouns, While it was easy to read, there were difficulties as well. There is a aspect of mystery and thriller and goodly amount of blood and violence.
    • 4/5
      This is great! Post-climate-catastrophe, floating city, refugee crisis, tech-telepathy with orcas and polar bears. I loved the mash-up of different cultures, the vibrancy of the city, and the way gender identity was handled. Full of ideas big and small, loads of action. Well done.
    • 4/5
      Climate change has turned much of humanity into refugees. Qaanaaq is a floating city in the Artic, controlled by its shareholders and teeming with both registered and unregistered occupants. When the sole survivor of a genocide arrives with an orca and a captive polar bear, she provides an impetus for a war by a crime syndicate against a powerful shareholder. All the while, the strange disease the breaks is driving people to horrible deaths amidst images of lives they’ve never led, and the AIs running the city can’t do anything about it. Although almost everything goes wrong and key players don’t make it to the end of the story, it’s also about the kind of hope that can persist even in ashes, and the family connections that survive all kinds of wrongs.

    Book preview

    Blackfish City - Sam J. Miller

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