Thursday, April 4, 2019

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Blackfish City by Sam J Miller




Blackfish City is a rarity for me - a book I originally DNFed (Did Not Finish a/k/a read partway and then dropped before completion) and then picked up back again at a later date for completion.  In this case, I dropped Blackfish City around 55% of the way through the book, but picked it up about a year later because the novel was nominated for a Nebula.  I didn't drop Blackfish City because I disliked the book - rather I just didn't care for any of the characters and as such just felt like it was tough for me to get interested enough to read further.

But again, the Nebula nod gave me incentive to give it another look, and this time I did finish the book.  Unfortunately, I stand by my original assessment - the book is by no means bad, as a post-apocalyptic (global warming caused chaos throughout the world) tale of a libertarian city gone horribly right and the people who struggle in it - in that the book just fails to develop the type of interesting characters who made me care about them, to make this book worth reading.  And without those interesting characters, the book's ideas just aren't really strong enough to carry it.

More after the Jump:

-----------------------------------------------Plot Summary-------------------------------------------------
After the Climate Wars destroyed civilization as we now know it, the floating City of Qaanaaq was founded in what used to be the Arctic Circle.  Composed of a number of Arms, with each higher-numbered Arm (up to Arm Eight) being more impoverished than the next, the City is allegedly a libertarian paradise: Taxes are paid by the unknown Shareholders, but most governmental functions are performed by software/AIs, with elected managers helping things along, but otherwise there's no official language, no official press, or no official anything.  Still, not all is perfect in Qaanaaq - a powerful crime boss is on the rise, an unknown person is spreading seemingly seditious news broadcasts, and a strange disease called "The Breaks" is spreading throughout, causing people to start seeing others' memories before killing them.

And then the Orcamancer comes: a woman with a polearm-like weapon in her hand, a killer whale at her side, and a chained polar bear in tow.  She provokes the imagination of all, who wonder: why is she here?  What does she want?  And perhaps most importantly: who or what is she?

Her arrival will trigger the actions of four people - the Grandson of a Shareholder who now has the Breaks, a non-binary teen wanting to rise up a crime-lord's organization, a beaten down man who throws fights for that same crime lord, a woman who works for a politician bur really wants to help her imprisoned mother who she's never met - to change the City forever, to make a new future unlike that which anyone could've foreseen.
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Blackfish City does an excellent job creating an interesting and believable post-apocalyptic dystopian (well, arguably) setting.  Qaanaaq is a very Sci-Fi city - it's a floating city in the Arctic!  Run in part by computer programs/AIs!  With a sexually transmitted disease that seems to give people other people's memories! - but in its class structure and nature it feels very damn believable as a possible future.  And the book takes an outrageous concept - people bonded to animals by nanotechnology, including killer whales and polar bears! - and makes it work in a way that never seems comedic or out of tone with the book's somewhat serious tone.  This world is tremendous, and I just wish the rest of the book lived up to it.

For the problem for me in this book is that none of the characters were that interesting.  The book essentially begins when 3 of the four main characters are pretty solidly formed, and none of these formations were particularly interesting and Miller's work on their backstories feels rather barebones more than anything else.

For example, Ankit is a former scaler turned political worker for a local politician who wants to help her imprisoned mom - how did she get this far in politics before she confronts the situations that she gets into immediately here?  How did she find out her mom was in the Cabinet and why does she care so much?   The book just essentially posits that she has done these things and does care without any good reason to explain that. 

The fourth main character, the non-binary teenage Soq, is the only one who really undergoes character development throughout and I'm not even sure that character development rather worked for me, with his agenda changing throughout the book in a way that I didn't really find believable.  And it's not just the main characters - a major character is a mob boss named "Go" who is a bit of a mess in terms of her alleged motivations and feelings.  And to go back to the main characters, one of these characters, "Fill," is a weird odd man out who never really connects with the other three and just has nothing of interest at all (in fact, he commits the most heinous act of the book, which is just...why.)  I'm not sure why he exists.

The result is a book where I just couldn't care about the ending and where the characters wound up, where the plot seemed just to move for the sake of moving, and where the book's narrative segments where it directly talks ideas - occasional POV sections that are from the seditious broadcasts - just seem blah without anything around them to make them interesting.  I can see why this book attracted attention, but it just did not work for me.
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