We follow four principal characters – a deliveryperson, a civil servant, the grandchild of one of the city's shareholders, and a street fighter – whose stories all slowly meld together as the story moves to the climax. In the end, though, I was glad to have persevered, because the plot threads are so well-connected it was worth the time it took to set them up. But the plot takes a long time to really get moving – almost a third of the book, in fact – and I was left wondering if it would ever start at all.

Miller writes with fine-tuned precision, never wasting a word. You can sense the author's enthusiasm in sketching out the social divisions and intricacies that make up the enormous floating city, and the customs and living arrangements of its disparate population. At times Blackfish City almost seems less like a novel and more like a highly detailed study of a world that feels far deeper than the novel's 300 pages would suggest. And despite the setting being well-removed from our own, it feels extremely close – like something that could be happening now, or in as little as ten years. But the problems of the past have followed it: massive poverty and inequality, refugees streaming in from all over the world, political instability and corruption, and deadly diseases like the breaks, a sexually transmitted infection that slowly drives those who are afflicted to madness.

Seeking refuge, countless people have fled to Qaanaaq, a mechanical arctic-sited city. The novel opens in the near future (it's never definitively stated when, but certainly a couple of generations removed from our own) in the aftermath of several climate wars and great destruction all around the globe. Fans of dystopian sci-fi will eat this one up – it's only January and already I can guarantee this one will make a lot of best of 2018 lists. I spent two weeks engrossed in Blackfish City.

Plausible and realistic yet fantastical and inventive, sure to be a highlight of 2018. This novel is queer, political, and eager to change the status quo-even if it’s a challenge to conceptualize the path to doing so.Summary: A spectacular science-fiction epic. It’s a thought-provoking and ambitious book, one that I found delightful and handsome at turns, a signal of the directions science fiction has to go in as contemporary life continues to evolve at pace. While all of our narrators technically inhabit the same city, the vast gaps in wealth, role, and experience between them make it seem as if they’re all aliens to one another. The bits I found most engaging were often the intimate sketches Miller gives of his characters’ interactions with their world. Though it has a fast-paced and intriguing political plot, Blackfish City is a novel driven in large part by its conceptual and thematic frameworks. Miller has woven a number of pressing contemporary concerns-homelessness, wealth inequality, political corruption, familial bonds, the AIDS epidemic-into the fabric of Qaanaaq, the floating city.

Blackfish city book