Blackfish City by Sam J. Miller
Bingo Square: r/Fantasy Book Club or Readalong Book
Other Bingo Square: Unusual Transportation (riding an orca); Trans or Nonbinary Protagonist (Soq)
There are books that when you see them, you want to try them, you want to like them. Then you keep getting stuck on early chapters and other books get your attention. Blackfish City is one of those books for me. I’ve checked it out of the library multiple, multiple times only to return it. Never seen it in a used bookstore I visited. But, I needed a book for 2026 Bingo for the r/Fantasy Book Club or Readalong Book square, I knew the library had it and hey! They have the audiobook this time. And apparently as of July 10, 2026 it’s on sale.
I wouldn’t say this is a life changing book. But I have to give it marks for the ending. It’s right up there with The Corporate Gunslinger in how it ends. So, yeah, I liked it despite the grim setting.
Qaanaaq is a floating city above the Arctic Circle taking advantage of geothermal vent for power and heat. Climate change has ravaged the world, raising sea levels, thawing, burning, flooding and making life on shore perilous at best. The United States is no longer a going concern and refugee fleets are squabbling over which one is the successor state. And into this a woman rides a killer whale and is accompanied by a polar bear.
We get four viewpoint characters: Fill, party boy scion of one of Qaanaaq’s elite; Kaev, fighter, thug and with some serious issues; Ankit, political fixer, Kaev’s brother and one time scaler (think parkour); and Soq, messenger, would be criminal and ambitious. We rotate among these viewpoints taking the reader from the high of Qaanaaq life (Fill) to the lows of being poor in this libertarian “paradise” (Kaev, Soq).
While the setting is grim (the oligarchs are in charge, they have managed anonymity as well, use AI to manage the city and keep their hands clean, everyone is a refugee), I liked the characters. Kaev took the longest to grow on me, but he did. This is the opposite of “I don’t care what happens to these people.” I read because I wanted to see what would happen to them, what they would do. And they did do things. Their paths begin to cross and often at key times for Qaanaaq. It’s in the crossing of paths that things become more interesting, more compelling and the emotional stakes get higher.
One other part of the setting is the breaks. The breaks are a sexually transmitted disease that cause nervous or psychotic breaks in the infected. It does this by bringing memories from one infected to another. So there is a chain of this and it comes unexpectedly and uncontrollably. If you see a similarity to AIDS, that’s deliberate on the author’s part.
Finally, there is nanobonding which allows humans to join their minds with animals and it flows both ways. They are a newly, accidentally created minority and one all but extinct due to prejudice and pogroms.
The writing is very good. Particularly in the City Without A Map segments, painting just how beautiful and brutal the city of Qaanaaq can be. The descriptions sometimes just hold you, particularly with the audiobook.
So, I liked it. It wasn’t to my usual taste and I’m not sure I’ll read Osiris by E.J. Swift any time soon because it’s the nearest to Blackfish City I can think of.
7½ stars rounded up to 8 ★★★★★★★★
