Lindsay's Reviews > Blackfish City

A complex novel of a post-climate change world set on a floating city in the arctic with a disparate cast of point-of-view characters who turn out to be connected in interesting ways.

Qaanaaq is an advanced technology floating platform city that's heated by geothermal energy. In many ways it's a vestige of our world, with extreme wealth inequality between the property owners and the vast majority of its inhabitants, many of them refugees of climate disasters and wars throughout the world. And as typical with societies with extreme wealth inequality, crime and criminal enterprise flourishes. Along with the day-to-day problems of overcrowding and never-ending new immigrants and crime, the city also faces an outbreak of a fatal sexually-transmitted disease called "the Breaks" which infects people with the memories of the people it's already infected.

Our point of view characters include Fill, a relatively well-off young gay man who's just been infected with the Breaks, Ankit, a former "scaler" (parkour-like sub-culture) and political fixer for one of the platform arm managers, Kaev, an aging fighter with a mental impairment working for a local crime boss, and Soq, a young non-binary messenger looking for position with that same crime boss. As a catalyst for the action a woman arrives in the city riding an orca and with a polar bear in tow and begins prowling the city as if she's looking for something and someone. She's clearly a nanobonder, a nearly extinct sub-culture of people who practiced nanomachine empathic links with animals.

This book has a lot to say. There's the obvious questioning of what sort of world climate change will leave us, but that's almost prosaic in this context. Of greater import is what sort of world the other great problems of our time are going to cause. Wealth inequality, capitalism as kleptocracy, oligopoly, immigration in a world where everyone is a refugee, political prisoners and the response to disease when government is largely dismantled.

Unfortunately, with so much to say, there's an enormous amount of exposition to convey. There's also a huge amount of information and backstory that needs to come across about each of the point-of-view characters as well as all their various supporting figures. That leaves the first half of the book feeling slow, disjointed and weighty with background information. However, once the massive infodump starts to peter out and connections begin to be made, the book really hums along.

There's some obvious comparisons to be made here. New York 2140 leaps to mind, particularly with the large ensemble cast with intertwining stories as well as the criticism of the power of wealth, but also Autonomous with the arctic setting, advanced technology and its consequences and the acceptance/normalization of alternate gender and sexuality and the equivalence of capitalism and criminality.

Interesting book and well worth a read.