Unlike a novel like The Sky Is Yours, where I despised the protagonists, I didn’t loathe Fill, Kaev, Ankit and Soq. 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.Īs I note above I struggled to engage with Blackfish City’s cast of characters. 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. 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. 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.Īnd then there’s the relationship between Kaev and Go. When Fill is incinerated as part of a plot to get revenge on his grandfather, I felt nothing. I’m also not invested in these characters.

In another sense, it undercuts the impression that Qaanaag is a city populated with a million people. In one sense it’s clever how Miller weaves together the disparate lives of the four main characters: Ankit, Kaev, Soq and Fill. 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. The flooding of cities across the world has led to civil strife and revolution. knee-jerk observationsĪs 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. 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. 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. This is despite the fact I’ve heard only praise for his work. Miller, not his short fiction, not his young adult novel published last year.

Sam miller blackfish city