Thomas Wagner | SFF180's Reviews > Blackfish City

(3.5*) Blackfish City is a gritty and propulsive novel that combines the aesthetics of classic Gibsonian cyberpunk with a more contemporary concern over such pressing issues as climate change, wealth inequality, political corruption and xenophobia. Sam J. Miller, who won the Andre Norton Award for his first novel, The Art of Starving, has set his first SF novel for adults aboard a massive oceanic city named Qaanaaq, located near the coast of Greenland above some geothermal vents from which it draws energy. Most of the old world is discussed in the past tense. What was once the United States has descended into a kind of Mad Max lawlessness following numerous wars over resources, and Qaanaaq, which is built in the shape of something like a massive starfish with eight arms, is straining under the influx of refugees from “the drowned world.”

Qaanaaq has a hands-off approach to government that seems like a Libertarian dream, and no, that’s not a good thing. City security is administered by benevolent AIs, while actual ownership of the city is divvied up among a cabal of anonymous shareholders, and any kind of human leadership exists in the form of elected Arm Managers who ostensibly tend to the needs of the citizenry. What this has allowed is the rapid ascension of organized crime and complete laissez-faire capitalism. The wealthy, as in most dystopian stories, live in rarified luxury and keep hundreds of residential properties off the market and empty, driving up real estate prices through artificial scarcity and forcing working people and refugees to settle for little more than repurposed shipping crates.

Like a lot of dystopian SF, the plot will involve a vengeful quest to even the scales of justice between the haves and have-nots. But where Miller helps his story rise above the pack is in refusing to offer tidy moral clarity between idealized, noble champions of the oppressed on one side, and one-dimensional sinister overlords on the other. Nearly everyone is a bit dirty in this town. (continued...)