{"id":4808,"date":"2018-09-02T16:53:52","date_gmt":"2018-09-02T20:53:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.e357.net\/beingernest\/?p=4808"},"modified":"2019-02-24T13:28:08","modified_gmt":"2019-02-24T18:28:08","slug":"blackfish-city-by-sam-miller","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/e357.net\/beingernest\/blackfish-city-by-sam-miller\/","title":{"rendered":"Blackfish City by Sam Miller"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>A woman, an orca, and a polar bear walk into a bar. Sorry, I had to say it. It\u2019s not a bar, but an artificial island, she doesn\u2019t walk into it so much as <\/em>motor in on a skiff, but the orca swam alongside, the polar bear was in chains, at least until it wasn\u2019t, and she\u2019s definitely come to kick ass. Set in a world that\u2019s paid the price of environmental recklessness and where <\/em>refugees from plague and economic collapse are building an ad-hoc society north of the <\/em>arctic circle, Blackfish City is an entrancing story, a vision neither utopian nor dystopic, but human in all its glory and weakness.<\/em><\/p>\n

Blackfish City is an artificial island in the Arctic that\u2019s much like the free zone in cyberpunk lore, outside national boundaries, creating its own society with winners and losers, and somewhat notional laws. The US has fallen prey to a combination of environmental disaster and a sexually transmitted disease called \u201cthe Breaks,\u201d a plague that infects people with memory fragments from the people its passed through, leaving the infected mouthing chaotic fragments before their ultimate demise. Not unlike the nature of the city itself.<\/p>\n

The city is a messy churn of power structures, shareholders, politicians (but no parties), crime lords and power brokers, and an AIs that try to make things work out with algorithms no human could comprehend. \u00a0Throughout the story runs a broadcast called \u201cCity Without a Map,\u201d whose author is unknown, possibly more than one person, or even a ‘bot, malware in the city net. It functions as a chaotic version of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, both making the incomprehensible city sensible and asserting its lack of structure, It confuses and comforts that \u201c \u2026there is no map here. No map is needed. No manual. Only stories. Which is why I\u2019m here.\u201d<\/p>\n

The woman with the orca and the polar bear is Masaaraq, and she\u2019s looking for something in the city ans she\u2019s come a long way, from ruined America, from internment camps where immigrants were used as experimental subject and slaughtered en masse<\/em>, and her search drives her, and the plot forward.<\/p>\n

Of course, it\u2019s a collision story, and they\u2019ll all come together in the end<\/p>\n

Blackfish City is a lot of different kinds of stories, just like the city is many cities, and the plot-driven one, good though it is, and central to everything, is only one aspect. I\u2019m a plot-hungry reader, always wanting to know what happens, and trust me, stuff happens.<\/p>\n

The novel is also full of thought experiments and commentary on the environment, politics, the viability of democracy, and a referendum on the Aids epidemic. Imagining what-if and calling out the present for its cluelessness is the proper business of science fiction, and Miller doesn\u2019t shy away from it a bit.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s the people in the story that shine the brightest in this story, told in viewpoint vignettes by beautifully written and characters, and this is the sort of book that has me going back to the beginning after I\u2019ve raced through it to get to the part where the bad guy gets whupped. Though nothing in Blackfish City is actually that simple.<\/p>\n

The story switches between four viewpoint characters, Fill, a young prostitute who\u2019s just been diagnosed with the breaks, Anakit, Chief of Staff for one of the major political players, Soq, a cog in the crime syndicate run by Go, a woman, who\u2019s the former lover of another POV character, Kaev, a fighter who has mastered the art of the graceful fall, losing to younger fighters so skillfully that he coaches them in their art while throwing matches. Five characters if you consider City Without a Map, who gets interstitial chapters which add obtusely to the narrative.<\/p>\n

For me, the writing sells the book. Here\u2019s a bit from the very beginning of the book, where Fill deals with the discovery that he\u2019s infected with the breaks.<\/p>\n

\n

A startling, uncontrollable reaction: Fill giggled. The snow projections could still make his chest swell with childish wonder. He waved his hand through a manta ray as it soared past.<\/em><\/p>\n

And all at once\u2014the pain went away. His throat, his stomach. His heart. The fear and the nightmare images of twisted bodies in refugee camp hospital beds; the memory of broken-minded breaks victims wandering the streets of the Upper Arms, the songs they sang, the things they shrieked, the things they did to themselves with fingers or knives without feeling it. Every time he followed a man down a dark alley, or met one at a lavish apartment, or dropped to his knees in a filthy Arm Eight public restroom, this was the ice-shard blade that scraped at his heart. This was what he\u2019d been afraid of.<\/em><\/p>\n

Fill laughed softly.<\/em><\/p>\n

When the worst thing that can possibly happen to you finally happens, you find that you are not afraid of anything.<\/em><\/p>\n

–\u00a0Blackfish City, Ecco<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Blackfish City<\/strong> is the Miller\u2019s second novel and set in the same world as his short story \u201cCalved\u201d which appeared in Asimov\u2019s (September 2015) at least three \u201cBest of Anthologies\u201d for that year.<\/p>\n

References<\/strong>:<\/p>\n