tl;dr

The world-building is fine, but I never engaged with or cared about the characters and the story.

opening remarks

I’ve not read any Sam J. Miller, not his short fiction, not his young adult novel published last year.  This is despite the fact I’ve heard only praise for his work.  I’m either slow on the uptake, wary of the hype or just being my own guy, refusing to be dictated by those damn gatekeepers and tastemakers.  So, if I am reading Sam J. Miller’s new novel Blackfish City, it’s because I want to and has nothing to do with the buzzy buzz the book is receiving.

knee-jerk observations

As with a good chunk of contemporary science fiction set a hundred or so years into the future, Blackfish City takes the disastrous effects of climate change as a given.  The flooding of cities across the world has led to civil strife and revolution. There’s a brief mention in the opening pages that the most recent American Government has fallen with “pundits predicting it’d be the last.”  Refugees from these broken nations have headed out to the Arctic Circle, to the floating city of Qaanaag, built like an asterisk, the home for almost a million people.

Climate change isn’t the only factor that’s led to the fall of nations around the world.  The out of control increase in malware, viruses and bots has broken the internet, killing the dream of an open digital environment and forcing those who still have viable networks to shut the door on the rest of the world.

Qaanaag initially has the feel of a socialist, small government utopia.  But it becomes clear that it has a significant class divide.

HA!  That’s a little bit awesome… even if they don’t disembowel anyone.

Soq, who is already my favourite character, even though they’ve only just been introduced, is a Slideway messenger (see above) and considers themselves beyond gender.  What’s sad and annoying is that in Miller’s future gender identity is still an issue, misgendering is common.  Am I naive enough to believe that even with all the cataclysm, death and destruction humanity would have graduated past the whole gender thing?  People should not still be viewing Soq as an oddity:

A reference to the fall of America and the mysterious women who recently came to Qaanaag with a captured bear and a killer whale in tow:

“City Without A Map” is a broadcast recorded by a person or persons unknown that can be heard across all of Qaanaag.  Not only does it point out the interesting nooks and crannies of the floating city, but there’s also an underlying political message, a whiff of revolution.  Fill is a big fan, and he’s been following the suggestions laid out by the broadcast.  He’s also just found out that he’s contracted the “breaks”, a sexually transmitted disease that causes people to forget.

Ankit works for the manager of Arm Seven (each arm has a manager, it’s a political position and the only nod to democracy on Qaanaag).  On a visit to one of her manager’s constituents – a refugee Tamil family – Ankit comes across a young girl who has the breaks.  This is at odds with the general thinking that the breaks is sexually transmitted.  She recommends to the manager that they assist this family and their daughter and others in a similar situation, but the manager wants nothing to do with those who have contracted the disease.  So Ankit, as an act of rebellion, posts a picture of the girl.  This does not go down well:

Kaev is a fighter who always, or nearly always loses his bouts because he’s been instructed to do so.  He works for the mob on Qaanaag.  The syndicate is run by a woman named Go who has a job for Kaev, one he’s not keen on:

Clearly, everyone has forgotten the AIDS epidemic and is just repeating the same tired old mistakes:

The mysterious woman who came to Qaanaag with an orca in tow is one of the few (possibly only) nanobonded people still alive.  This news report helpfully provides some background:

The Killer Whale Woman AKA Blackfish AKA the orcamancer is confronted by a group of pitchfork-wielding zealots who view her as an abomination.  Her response requires little effort other than wielding her viscous weapon:

Fill’s Grandfather is wealthy. Mega-rich. One of the original shareholders that built and established Qaanaag. The syndicate boss Go is making trouble, putting pressure on Grandfather’s interests. Grandfather isn’t too concerned, but he meets with Fill and provides him with the location of a safe house and access to a dangerous piece of military grade software.  A case of Chekov’s guns maybe?

It would appear that Kaev has somehow become nanobonded with the polar bear.  This means he feels the crunch, maybe even tastes the blood, when the polar bear bites down on a victim, in this instance Go’s henchman.

The woman with the whale – her name Masaaraq – speaks for the first and only time about the slaughter of her people.  In telling her story, she explains that the nanobonded were part of a long line of marginalised people, scapegoated to divert attention away from the capitalists who broke the world:

In one sense it’s clever how Miller weaves together the disparate lives of the four main characters: Ankit, Kaev, Soq and Fill.  In another sense, it undercuts the impression that Qaanaag is a city populated with a million people.

I’m also not invested in these characters.

Spoilers follow: 

When Fill is incinerated as part of a plot to get revenge on his grandfather, I felt nothing.  Maybe I’m heartless, or perhaps I find it hard to muster compassion for a privileged, promiscuous twenty-something who only begins to take life seriously when he contracts a life-threatening disease.

And then there’s the relationship between Kaev and Go.  To hide the fact that Soq is their lovechild, Miller leads us to believe that their relationship is purely business, the syndicate boss and her reluctant henchman.  With the appearance of Massaraq – the woman bonded to a killer whale – we discover that Kaev and Go have always been in love with each other.  It’s a reveal dumped on us so abruptly that it’s difficult to believe in their romance, even when they start espousing love for each other.

The Gist Of It

As I note above I struggled to engage with Blackfish City’s cast of characters.  Unlike a novel like The Sky Is Yours, where I despised the protagonists, I didn’t loathe Fill, Kaev, Ankit and Soq.  I just never cared about their collective fates.  It’s a shame because I like that they represent different economic segments of Qaanaaq society.  Fill is the privileged rich boy, Ankit is the middle-class office drone, Kaev is the blue-collar fighter, and Soq is the hand-to-mouth courier.  It’s also rare for a science fiction novel to deal with both class and identity.  While I find it frustrating that gender fluidity has yet to be fully accepted in this near-future society, it’s pleasing to see them represented.  But as smart and diverse as this novel is, as much as Miller comments on the rapacious nature of capitalism – a common enemy in climate change fiction – I found his character work clumsy and forced.

For one, Miller falls back on Stephen King’s old friend italics to tell us what the characters are thinking.  To be fair, he doesn’t use it all the time, but when he does trot out those slanty letters, it’s generally to emphasise a protagonist’s intentions or make clear their state of mind.  Nothing is left to chance, to subtext, to reading between the lines.  Also, while I don’t have an issue with separate narrative threads twining together, having three of the characters discover later in the novel that they’re related, and, in particular, are central to the power struggles occurring on the floating city, not only comes off as coincidental and lazy but also undercuts the idea that Qaanaaq is a city of a million people where space is precious.  Finally, there’s the prose. It’s not terrible by any stretch, but it’s dry and workman-like.  I know Qaanaaq, as a place, is not a barrel of laughs, what with the class division, a disease running rampant, the flood of refugees from flooded parts of the world, but the novel is so earnest and grim, utterly devoid of any humour or personality.  Soq comes the closest to being the story’s bright spark, but it’s not sustained throughout the book.

I haven’t said much about the worldbuilding or the ideas because I believe a story has to be more than just the shiny new concepts.  It has to be about the characters that populate the world and in the case of Blackfish City they never really come alive.