Blackfish City is a speculative fiction novel set well into our global warming future. The seas have risen, coastal cities flooded, and the world awash with millions of refugees escaping their failed governments.

An industrious group of “shareholders” have created a new city on the sea, Qaanaaq, using oil rigging technology for the foundation, and a geothermal ocean vent for heat and power. In creating this completely new future world, Miller is tasked with not only telling us a story, but also making us understand and believe in this world with all it’s strange architecture, new technology, and political history. At times the primary narrative gets lost in the weeds of context.

The narrative is told through successive chapters, each devoted to the story of a different character and told from their first person point of view. The characters reappear in the 9 sections and by the end of the book we understand how their lives are connected.

Blackfish City is a meditation on family and connections of blood and memory. The future families of Qaanaaq have a much greater variety of gender and species, the result of scientific experimentation connecting people and animals through nanotechnology. This is interesting in concept but Miller devotes so much time to explaining these relational complexities that we get a little short-changed in the character development. At one point in the book, for example, two characters learn they are parent and child. Until that moment I had thought these characters were the same age.

All these stumbling blocks make it difficult to become fully engrossed in Miller’s vision, one which is both a dystopic warning against continued environmental plunder and a utopian future which redefined family, gender and species. The complex questions posed by this vision are never given chance to flourish. At the end of the novel, Masaaraq, one of the mother figures quips, “Home is where we make it. Where we’re together.” After a novel full of explicating the particular challenges of this particular future, this generic ending is a disappointment.