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 ... It’s a thought-provoking and ambitious book, one that I found delightful and handsome at turns, a signal of the directions science fiction has to go in as contemporary life continues to evolve at pace. This novel is queer, political, and eager to change the status quo—even if it’s a challenge to conceptualize the path to doing so.
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 ... As each of his main characters strives toward some goal — freeing a mother from a prisonlike mental hospital, tracking down the author of a mysterious guidebook, simply trying to retire with dignity — they gain insights not only into the true nature of their city, but into their own families as well.
Blackfish City...establishes a dystopian world that stands apart in a crowded field ... Blackfish City distinguishes itself by a number of idiosyncratic touches ... In a dystopic future where climate change threatens human survival, a strange 'orcamancer' might offer the only glimmer of hope for the inhabitants of the floating city of Qaanaaq.
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 ... Blackfish City is a masterfully crafted, fast-paced read. It’s fun. It’s timely. And it should definitely be on your summer reading list.
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 ... Miller has crafted a thriller that unflinchingly examines the ills of urban capitalism ... The novel stumbles only at the very end, in a denouement that feels just a little too hurried for the characters’ twisting journey.
