Black Fish City Review

An Arctic Climate Fiction Boiling Over with Tension

For decades the sea ate the land, causing the collapse of human society. In the absence of governance, humans turned to new mind-numbing drugs, human experimentation, and bloodshed. 

Lots of bloodshed. 

What survives from those days is a disease nicknamed “the breaks,” a universal hatred for the survivors of The Hive Project, and Qaanaaq–home to a melting pot of a million refugees. Qaanaaq is a new city built on oil rig scaffolding over the deep waters of the Arctic north of Iceland and east of Greenland. It sits over a geothermal vent which warms the city. Glaciers provide fresh water and human waste is cycled into methane that lights its lamps. Currently, it's struggling against an epidemic of the breaks, a disease that fills the victim’s heads with the memories of its previous casualties until the sick lose themselves in hallucinations and madness.

A survivor of the Hive Project has just arrived in Qaanaaq. Unaware of the epidemic and a target of religious groups who consider her nanite-mediated close relationships with an orca and a polar bear “unnatural,” she risks her life to scour the city for the others she knows survived the attack on her Inuit village.

Sam Miller has created a delightfully detailed world of seething social injustice, technology, and chaos. A world run by mob bosses and land owners kept hidden from the impoverished masses. A world where being “dangerous” to the shaky social order can get you imprisoned in a hospital with those suffering from the breaks. A world on the verge of exploding into bloodshed once again.