Blackfish City
Oct. 24th, 2018 03:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraOne of my favorite things about reading a lot of short sff is the pretentious-hipster pleasure of having my eye on an exciting new author from their short stories and then getting to read their first book with an air of "oh yes, I knew you could do it!". This is not actually Sam J. Miller's first novel, that would be last year's Art of Starving which won the Norton and was up for the Lodestar, but *I* remember "Ghosts of Home", hip hip hip. (Do hipsters say hip? They clearly should.)
Blackfish City! Adult science fiction. A woman comes to a floating city with an orca and a polar bear; things happen. It was excellent and I recommend it; I didn't know too much about it going in, so, uh, stop reading here for that experience, I guess. :)
But I think I can say a little more outside of spoiler cuts? This is partly a novel of place, of this particular imagined city, which is a thing I'm into and Miller does very well here, showing us its aesthetics and economy and politics and people and technology very smoothly and vividly. I'm really noticing The Retreat To The North (the migration/recentering of North American life and commerce into Canada and/or the Arctic fleeing the effects of climate change) as a trope/setting in science fiction lately - here, Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach, Annalee Newitz's Autonomous - in much the way that Lunar Colonization used to be. In fact, I would argue they're playing a similar role in the sf collective consciousness, as plausible-feeling next-century+ futures, interesting and worthy of exploration in themselves, but also just the kind of place a scifi writer of the time imagines their story happening in. (Also I am endlessly amused to see references to Tuktoyaktuk turning up in SF, a town I previously knew as the most-obscure place I've ever owned a T-shirt from, since my dad had a cruise leave from there once. Hip hip hip.)
Gonna say some more behind a spoiler cut - there are some major spoilers here:
I gasped out loud twice while reading this, once when the pieces started to come together and once near the end. It's definitely a little slow to get going but Miller has a bunch of pieces he needs to get onto the board before he can set them off, and I really like that kind of thing when it's done well. For me, it almost felt like a genre shift, that I thought it was one kind of story and then, click click kaboom, oh, wait, this is a *family* story, this is a very personal set of character arcs inside this bigger societal picture. The aesthetic is deliberately inverted (wet and white/black and green instead of dry and gold and brown) but I think this is secretly an SF Western - the lone gunslinger comes riding into town looking to settle old scores, there's an outlaw gang, questions of homesteads and property rights, a jailbreak, and a standoff at the end...
There were a couple of places where I thought Miller's writing of the nanobonders was feeling a little exoticized, a little too noble-savage so pure so strong, but if it's a Western I like that the indigenous-descended people got to be the heroes, and also I can't really blame him for being a little bit in love with Masaaraq, she's so fucking badass and she earned it. (I really liked all the characters, which I mean in the "great character work" sense for everybody and the "they were nifty and I am fond of them" sense for the family. I haven't even touched on Fill and the whole breaks-as-an-AIDS-metaphor thing but I'm psyched to see Miller continue to explore some of the themes that made "Things With Beards" so powerful.)
For extra credit, recall that Miller is a huge ATLA fan and see how many influences you can spot. ;) Once I started thinking about it I feel that there are a lot of little places where you can see how ATLA was one of the major things that went into the imagination blender for this one...
Blackfish City! Adult science fiction. A woman comes to a floating city with an orca and a polar bear; things happen. It was excellent and I recommend it; I didn't know too much about it going in, so, uh, stop reading here for that experience, I guess. :)
But I think I can say a little more outside of spoiler cuts? This is partly a novel of place, of this particular imagined city, which is a thing I'm into and Miller does very well here, showing us its aesthetics and economy and politics and people and technology very smoothly and vividly. I'm really noticing The Retreat To The North (the migration/recentering of North American life and commerce into Canada and/or the Arctic fleeing the effects of climate change) as a trope/setting in science fiction lately - here, Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach, Annalee Newitz's Autonomous - in much the way that Lunar Colonization used to be. In fact, I would argue they're playing a similar role in the sf collective consciousness, as plausible-feeling next-century+ futures, interesting and worthy of exploration in themselves, but also just the kind of place a scifi writer of the time imagines their story happening in. (Also I am endlessly amused to see references to Tuktoyaktuk turning up in SF, a town I previously knew as the most-obscure place I've ever owned a T-shirt from, since my dad had a cruise leave from there once. Hip hip hip.)
Gonna say some more behind a spoiler cut - there are some major spoilers here:
I gasped out loud twice while reading this, once when the pieces started to come together and once near the end. It's definitely a little slow to get going but Miller has a bunch of pieces he needs to get onto the board before he can set them off, and I really like that kind of thing when it's done well. For me, it almost felt like a genre shift, that I thought it was one kind of story and then, click click kaboom, oh, wait, this is a *family* story, this is a very personal set of character arcs inside this bigger societal picture. The aesthetic is deliberately inverted (wet and white/black and green instead of dry and gold and brown) but I think this is secretly an SF Western - the lone gunslinger comes riding into town looking to settle old scores, there's an outlaw gang, questions of homesteads and property rights, a jailbreak, and a standoff at the end...
There were a couple of places where I thought Miller's writing of the nanobonders was feeling a little exoticized, a little too noble-savage so pure so strong, but if it's a Western I like that the indigenous-descended people got to be the heroes, and also I can't really blame him for being a little bit in love with Masaaraq, she's so fucking badass and she earned it. (I really liked all the characters, which I mean in the "great character work" sense for everybody and the "they were nifty and I am fond of them" sense for the family. I haven't even touched on Fill and the whole breaks-as-an-AIDS-metaphor thing but I'm psyched to see Miller continue to explore some of the themes that made "Things With Beards" so powerful.)
For extra credit, recall that Miller is a huge ATLA fan and see how many influences you can spot. ;) Once I started thinking about it I feel that there are a lot of little places where you can see how ATLA was one of the major things that went into the imagination blender for this one...
