"Blackfish City" by Sam J. Miller (2018)

 **A post-apocalypse in which the new world looks sadly all too much like the old one**

This book is a modern classic, gritty and dark with William Gibson and Blade Runner vibes, a near-future vision of a world where human history changes but humanity can't defeat its demons.  Loved it from the vibe to the pointed messages that have only gotten more and more relevant in the six years since its publication

Set in a floating city in the North Atlantic purpose-built following climate disaster, this story juggles multiple viewpoints across the city.  Each narrator lives in a different area of the city and belongs to a different social class (a child of privilege, a queer sex worker, a blue-collar washed-up fighter . . .) and the book tells the story of the city as a whole.  The obvious implication is that the city itself, this new society itself, is in fact the main character:  "This city contains so many cities, he thought. So many lives I’ll never get to live, so many spaces I’ll never get invited into."  As a natural city-dweller myself, one who always loves learning a new city (or learning something new about a city I thought I'd already met), this book is a joy just for that.

As a technical achievement, it's incredibly well-written, managing to keep the pacing frenetic but still understandable as we jump across multiple plotlines.  This is a page-turner for sure, thriller-plotting and always something new to learn about our narrators and the world in which they live.  These plotlines of course end up converging in--well, I don't want to spoil it

Suffice it to say that, unfortunately, the city (our secret main character) isn't doing so hot.  The city doesn't work great.  There is poverty and uberwealth, and there are plenty of people who make sure they will wield their power to keep it that way.  Who will do anything to keep it that way:

Money is a mind, the oldest artificial intelligence. Its prime directives are simple, its programming endlessly creative. Humans obey it unthinkingly, with cheerful alacrity. Like a virus, it doesn’t care if it kills its host. It will simply flow on to someone new, to control them as well. City Hall, the collective of artificial intelligences, is a framework of programs constructed around a single, never explicitly stated purpose: to keep Money safe.

Overall, there's a beautiful bleakness in Miller’s utter conviction that even given the opportunity to create a new civilization from the ground up, an opportunity to start over and build something better . . . of all the things to carry over from the dead and gone world, of course humanity would choose to import inequality.  Of course we would.  Because that's who we are, and we can't escape who we are.  That's one of the books central theses:

We want villains. We look for them everywhere. People to pin our misfortune on, whose sins and flaws are responsible for all the suffering we see. We want a world where the real monstrosity lies in wicked individuals, instead of being a fundamental facet of human society, of the human heart. Stories prime us to search for villains. Because villains can be punished. Villains can be stopped. But villains are oversimplifications.

Oh and the novel's plot, the events that will change this city, are set into motion when a woman rides into town riding an Orca.  Possibly she can control it, it's unclear.  She is referred to as an Orcamancer, and I'd known was an option would absolutely have been my career choice as a child.  I feel like my guidance counselor kind of let me down

I love this book because it holds fast and true to the precept underlying some of my very favorite science fiction:  Time change, tech changes, the world changes, but people don't.  Like I said above, this is a very Gibson-esque book

Miller is talking about who we are as a people by showing the world we would create.  There would be selfishness and iniquity . . . but hopefully, there would also be a place for altruism that might surprise us.  In the end, maybe we can be better.  We might have to hit rock bottom first, though.  As I write this in November 2024, maybe that's what will happen.  And we'll see where we go from there:

When the worst thing that can possibly happen to you finally happens, you find that you are not afraid of anything.

Hopefully our society doesn't need a woman riding into town on an Orca in order to get us moving.  But if we are going to have someone ride into town on an Orca, I'd like to be the first to volunteer

I loved this book

If you surrender to the wind, you can ride it.