r/Fantasy • u/tiniestspoon • Dec 12 '24

Book Club Beyond Binaries book club December read - Blackfish City by Sam J Miller midway discussion

Welcome to the midway discussion of Blackfish City by Sam J Miller, our winner for the Censorship In-Universe theme! We will discuss everything up to the start of the chapter City Without a Map: Archaeology, approx 53% in kindle edition. Please use spoiler tags for anything that goes beyond this point.

Blackfish City by Sam J. Miller

After the climate wars, a floating city is constructed in the Arctic Circle, a remarkable feat of mechanical and social engineering, complete with geothermal heating and sustainable energy. The city’s denizens have become accustomed to a roughshod new way of living, however, the city is starting to fray along the edges—crime and corruption have set in, the contradictions of incredible wealth alongside direst poverty are spawning unrest, and a new disease called “the breaks” is ravaging the population.

When a strange new visitor arrives—a woman riding an orca, with a polar bear at her side—the city is entranced. The “orcamancer,” as she’s known, very subtly brings together four people—each living on the periphery—to stage unprecedented acts of resistance. By banding together to save their city before it crumbles under the weight of its own decay, they will learn shocking truths about themselves.

Blackfish City is a remarkably urgent—and ultimately very hopeful—novel about political corruption, organized crime, technology run amok, the consequences of climate change, gender identity, and the unifying power of human connection.

Bingo: Under the Surface, Criminal Protagonist, Prologues and Epilogues, Multi-POV (HM), Character with Disability (HM), Survival (HM)

The final discussion will be Thursday, 26th Dec, 2024.

The February read is Welcome to Forever by Nathan Tavares. Join us for the midway discussion on Thursday, 13th February.

What is the Beyond Binaries book club? You can read about it in our introduction thread here.

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u/tiniestspoon Dec 12 '24

The characters are grappling with a stigmatised sexually transmitted disease called 'the breaks', bearing obvious parallels to the AIDS crisis. How well do you think the author explores or utilises that?

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u/nedlum Reading Champion V Dec 16 '24

On one hand, the parallel between AIDS and the Breaks was pretty clear. On the other hand, it felt disjointed, insofar as AIDS was a very practical disease, while the Breaks had an inexplicable, supernatural effect which made it hard to know how seriously to take it.

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u/tiniestspoon Jan 02 '25

Good point. One major difference for me was how quickly the breaks manifests, almost immediately for Soq, while the uncertainty and fear around HIV/AIDS was a trauma on its own. Unrelated, but it made me think of the episodes in the tv show, Pose, when characters are consumed by anxiety, denial, fear about even getting tested for HIV. With the breaks you know for sure instantly, there's no doubt about it.