Please note that this book is not for me - I have read the book, However I had to DNF and because i do not like to give negative reviews I will not review this book fully - there is no specific reason for not liking this book. I found it a struggle to read and did not enjoy trying to force myself to read this book.

Apologies for any inconvenience caused and thank you for the opportunity to read this book

Blackfish City by Sam J Miller (review copy from Orbit) is a thoughtful near-future thriller. The floating city of Qaanaq in the Arctic has become a place of refuge in the aftermath of the Climate Wars that have ripped apart the world as we know it. A huge cultural melting pot of refugees, it is a place where capitalism runs unfettered. The majority of the wealth is held by a tiny group of people known as shareholders, while the vast majority of people scrape out a living however they can. But the city is also plagued by a strange, incurable, degenerative disease known as 'the breaks' which is passed on by close physical contact.

Life in Qaanaq is disrupted by the arrival of a woman known as the orcamancer. She appears to be one of a group of people thought to be extinct, who were nanobonded to animals and able to communicate with them. She is silent - but violent - and the reason for her journey to Qaanaq is unclear. Four of Qaanaq's residents are drawn together to unravel the mystery of the orcamancer - Fill, a shareholder's grandson who has contracted a particularly virulent form of the breaks; Ankit, a staffer for one of the local elected politicians; Soq, a young, gender-fluid messenger with ambitions; and Kaev, who makes his living as a beam fighter (one of Qaanaq's sports).

There is a satisfying mystery at the heart of Blackfish City, which draws together the four viewpoint characters neatly with a nice, slow reveal. The world-building is also extremely rich, with Miller having put a huge amount of work into his post-Climate Wars setting. You can almost smell the fish sauce and hear the sound of the waves while you are reading. But for all that, this is a book that struggles to rise above those things. The plotting is extremely slow, particularly at the beginning of the novel. While Blackfish City is rich and immersive as a reading experience, it fails to deliver much beyond a competent thriller in an innovative and well-constructed setting.

Goodreads rating: 3*

An entirely believable PANS. You feel this cold happen soon, and yet the classic human behaviours will attempt to apply to a changing world. This is both an excellent thriller and glimpse of the future.

On the remote and brilliantly engineered futuristic city in the arctic circle, conflict rages through every level of society, wealthy and impoverished, powerful and unfortunate. One day, a woman arrives at the city riding on the back or an orca and accompanied by a giant polar bear… I’m not sure whether that sounds like a cyber punk allegorical story or a Nordic fairy tale, either way I was in. And I stayed in because Blackfish City has some of the most exceptional world building I have ever seen. The city is richly imagined and dense with important detail. The futuristic dystopian setting is believable and yet fantastical at the same time. Best of all the four POV narrators are well drawn and engaging. A truly excellent book. My only quibble is that it’s a bit slow to get going despite a very tantalising teaser prologue. Highly recommend.

We are used to the megacities in science fiction. Those places where humanity clusters for it’s final days. Be they forever raining, neon-lit or patrolled by grimacing helmeted police warriors this is where stand and fall. In this new entrant to the genre we visit Qaanaaq a city that resembles multiple rigs merged together in the far arctic while most of the rest of the world is drowned or uninhabitable. As often is the case it brings all of humanity’s darker impulses but the stand-out message I got from this was a sense of hope making it a truly remarkable start to what I hope is a fascinating series.

Qaanaaq is a fascinating place ruled by AIs but also purely there to make the people feel better there are human officials (who do little) and at its heart (as always) the powerful and the wealthy protected from everything. People have biological communicators but are still may be squashed with many others into decaying living quarters that may be next to billionaire’s empty holiday home. A vibrant black market thrives; regional tensions still exist in miniature and cross the wrong person you may find yourself throw in the freezing ocean waters. Initially this is exactly what you would expect from a future world where the cataclysms we fear finally occur.

The story primarily focuses on the lives of four characters from all parts of the society. Fil is a young gay man who comes from the richer side of society. A lost soul who tries to renounce his past he is suddenly shocked to find he appears to be infected with a new disease that means you are connected to all those previously infected; “The Breaks” means you increasingly are experiencing time our of reality. Then we have Ankit who has slowly worked her way up through government and is working hard to get her candidate re-elected but suddenly finding a child with The Breaks she realises her conscience wants to help people rather than simply say what people want to hear – this was not the wisest move.

At the other end of the spectrum we have Kaev who as he has a severe issue with communication and apparent emotion has found himself as a journeyman fighter constantly having to lose games to allow hot young marketable talent to win and when not doing that works for the an up and coming gangling boss he fell in love with. Finally, we have a non-binary character in young So who has been building a reputation as a fearless deliverer of ahem questionable goods but finally has found himself with an opportunity to work for Go who finds him a promising new worker. Impressively and quite organically these four characters will build up your understanding of the world and cultures that resides in Qaanaaq and slowly we see the dotted lines as each one crosses paths with the others discovering many connections which as a reader I loved how it wasn’t simply spoon-fed in exposition. The way the group then bonds felt completely logical and it’s a team you really route for and fear for their survival.

Into this city of standard competing factions comes the rogue element – an orcamancer. Someone mentally bonded with an animal through a form of biochemistry science. Many years ago, this was deemed as heretical science and those who had received it would often find themselves hunted and destroyed. However, as our unnamed Orcamancer is a vicious fighter aided by both a killer whale and polar bear the few factions who try to pick up the mantle of executioner soon find it was a bloody bad idea…emphasis on blood. Our quartet and the Orcamancer however do have work to do and this will challenge the city’s power struggles which will result in retaliation...

At first, you really do think you’ve heard this one before and it just appears beautifully realised. All the characters stand out in their personalities and the way it has been plotted where they cross paths is done subtly and really is quite stunning in how easily the world and its history is explained. But what I feel is the books selling point is that this book becomes much more about a found family as the characters start to work together and slowly its less about purely grasping for power but doing the right thing for the better of humanity. It’s a book that asks the question that if we did truly lose most of the world do we really need to carry on all the conflicts and social rules we have created, or could we work to be better? Is that our only source of hope for the future? This really creates a freshness and then slowly you look at the city and realise people are evolving learning other languages, cultures and crossing boundaries. Add to that potential changes in technology and while it’s a story with deceptions, lies and violence there is a sense of optimism that a future can be developed although it will have to be hard-won.

This is one of those novels I’ve been mentally coming back to several times since I finished it exploring why it capture my attention so much. My impression is that its taken a verrrrrrry familiar idea in SF and given it in these darkened times a more progressive outlook than we have had for a while with a sense of hope is something we all need right now. Strongly recommended to SF fans out there to pick up now

https://www.runalongtheshelves.net/blog/2018/5/19/blackfish-city-by-sam-j-miller

Really enjoyed this book. The world building was fantastic. I'm definitely going to be looking for the authors other story 'Calved' which is set in the same world. I found out very quickly that it isn't a commuting book. It doesn't work when you're only reading snippets at a time. You need to spend time with the book and the characters, but it is worth it. I've already recommended it to several friends.

Sometimes the pacing felt a bit off and some of the characters were only there to provide plot direction. But it was beautifully written, an enjoyable read and the action scenes were fantastic. I thought I had the plot twists all worked out ... I didn't. A wonderful mix of scifi and fantasy

3.5 stars

I had to be patient with this book because it was only towards the 40% mark that the story really took off.
On a very basic level this story takes the concept of the Golden Compass – humans bonding with non-human entities (in this case real animals) - but made it much darker, grittier and more terrifying. This is no children’s story.

I really enjoyed the overall storyline and was determined to give it 4 stars for its wonderful atmosphere and imaginative world HOWEVER….

The author had the knack of referring to the polar bear has having hands (?) and later corrected it by referring to paws. This is a small editing error and as I read a galley I really hope was corrected before publishing.

And then there is Soq. Now this was a very interesting character, but one thing just drove me to distraction. The author made Soq gender fluid so Soq didn’t want to be referred to as he or she but them or they. It was a disruptive little niggle that took me out of the story every time I read it.

I found the concept of the Breaks, very well done. This is a shameful disease normally affecting the lowest of society. When infected you see images that slowly drive you insane. There is no cure and no real cause and turns out to be much more complicated than anyone could have anticipated.

Would I recommend this? The story is worth the read, the world building solid and the storyline entertaining. Yes, there were a few little things that bothered me, but this was a unique story with strong imagery and a satisfyingly open-ended ending.

A disturbing story about what our future on planet Earth could be like. I found the first half of this book to be a little disjointed at times, particularly with the passages about the 'City Without a Map'. But everything does seem to come together at around the halfway mark making for a decent story about family and revenge. set on a floating city in the Arctic Circle A good one for fans of hard sci-fi.

I received an e-arc of Blackfish City from the lovely folks at Little, Brown UK via Netgalley in exchange for my review – thank you to the publisher and the author!

Blackfish City is a post-apocalyptic tale with an unusual premise: it’s set on Qaanaaq, a floating star-shaped city in the Arctic, built by a coalition of nations with private sector investment to be a haven for those fleeing climate change related disasters in the rest of the world. In Qaanaaq, everyone is a refugee, and much of is culture is based on the many remnants of human societies bumping up against each other to create new food, music and art. The city itself was built to be administered almost exclusively by AI, with elections for largely powerless posts on each of its eight “arms”, but decisions otherwise made by infallible machine logic. Unfortunately, what seemed like a good idea thirty years ago has turned out to be inadequate to the challenges Qaanaaq is now facing, and the city is decaying as its government fails to keep up with the impact of inequality, overpopulation and criminal extortion on its people. On top of this, a new epidemic called “The Breaks” is sweeping through the population, causing fear and stigma towards those it affects (it’s transmitted through body fluids, so sexual transmission is assumed to be the most common method of contracting it) and infecting its sufferers with strange delusions which appear to give them knowledge and memories from other places and times before inevitably killing them.

Into this city floats a woman, an orca, and a polar bear, representing the last of another strange technological experiment on humans. Her presence is the catalyst for events in the lives of other residents of the city: hapless rich boy Fill, coping with his new Breaks infection; Ankit, an election aide trying to understand the mystery behind her mother’s disappearance in the city’s prison-cum-psychiatric hospital; Kaev, a martial arts fighter who struggles with his own unexplained mental health issues; and Soq, a genderqueer teenager scraping together a living at the bottom of Qaanaaq’s socioeconomic heap. For the first half, Blackfish City reads rather like a fast-paced mosaic novel, with events and characters overlapping between the different stories, but no obvious whole. Things do coalesce in the second half, however, with a lot of new connections revealed between the characters which brings them together in a single story, though not necessarily on the same side. The narrative structure is mostly done very well, although there are elements from the characters’ individual plots which fall by the wayside as the group narrative overtakes the rest – most notably Ankit, whose political career and decisions get pushed quickly to one side as the plot to find her mother intersects with everyone else.

Blackfish City US.jpg

Blackfish City’s greatest strength is its atmospheric worldbuilding, using its different points of view to bring an odd and yet, in many ways, familiar city to life. My favourite parts of this were the little touches: like calling the main public services are “Health” and “Safety”, reminding us that Qaanaaq is a corporate idea of how a perfect city would be run, or having Fill react to a public art installation which involves projecting living images onto street fog. There’s also the chapters involving a piece of media (something we in the early 21st century would most likely call a podcast) called City Without a Map, which is an entirely anonymous production where different people read out monologues about different aspects of the city, and its culture and history. The whole thing adds up to a fictional city with a strong sense of place, where its easy to sympathise with the characters as they go through various stages of nostalgia and frustration with their deeply imperfect home. We also build up a picture of what the rest of the world looks like from asides and the occasional character moment, providing a grim but necessary backdrop.



It’s interesting to contrast this realistic portrayal of a future city with the journey the characters themselves go on, which I felt took a lot of beats from less realistic, more mythological styles of storytelling. The mystery behind Masaaraq, the orca woman, is also technological in nature but the way its handled, and the cultural understanding that she brings to who she is, gives it a strong note of fantasy, as do the revelations behind the nature of the Breaks. I felt this blending of realism and science-indistinguishable-from-magic was very well done, adding another layer to the sense of culture and place which Qaanaaq evokes. (I should add the disclaimer that I’m not sure if Masaaraq’s culture is supposed to be based on any particular indigenous traditions, and if so how well the parallels were handled – it felt like it was supposed to be its own thing but it’s not my area of expertise.)
My main source of frustration with Blackfish City was its depth. This isn’t a particularly long book, and it uses its space to cover a great deal of worldbuilding ground, as well as bringing in four main characters, an occasional fifth perspective, and a number of interludes for the different City Without a Map monologues. Inevitably, this means that it touches on a lot of things briefly which then never come up again – Ankit’s aspirations to change the political narrative being one, Kaev’s participation in the intriguing martial arts spectator sport of the city another. I could easily have read another hundred pages in this novel bringing “side quests” to a more satisfying close (or integrating them into the whole), as well as fleshing out character relationships and diving deeper into their particular corners of the city. The ending also felt a little rushed, although it did leave the story on a note which is true to both the characters and the city itself: tentative hope in the face of a broken world.

All in all, Blackfish City is a very strong piece of speculative fiction, creating a fully realised fictional city whose problems provoke us to ask difficult questions about the present and future of our own world. While it didn’t do everything I’d wish for, what it does deliver is well worth anyone’s time, and I’ll definitely be looking out for more of Sam J. Miller’s work in future.

Slow build but I find most sci-fis don’t really get going until the halfway point. At first it didn’t feel like there was a connection and then when it comes together it makes sense, all the pieces slot into place. That’s when the story got really good for me and I couldn’t put it down. Favourite character was Fill, because that guy needed some love. I like how everything weaved together and the animals.

I loved the vivid description of the city of Qaanaaq and its inhabitants.
The story is about joy, hate, love and change. At the same time it is also the story of a thirty-year search, about family ties and about finding peace.

I received an ARC from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.