I was really imagining Qaanaaq as a giant oil rig where a million people lived, and I did a lot of research into the various types of anchoring technology that facilitate human habitation and labor in the deep ocean. Did you have any particular real-world inspirations for Qaanaaq? Reading your novel, I found myself thinking of experiments in artificial islands, from Sealand onwards. Also all of my stuff takes place in a shared universe, so whenever I start to explore a world in fiction there’s often places and characters and speculative conceits that crop up repeatedly. In my short story “Calved,” I had previously visited Qaanaaq – a gritty rambunctious future post-climate-change floating city in the Arctic Circle – and that felt like the perfect place for the orcamancer to run wild in. She showed up on the doorstep of my brain and demanded my attention, and I was too afraid of her to say No! At first she was a teenager, but as the story evolved I realized that wasn’t right for the mission that she was on – she was actually older, wiser, more formidable, a grandmother on a mission of love but also copious bloodshed. Was there one piece of the book from which all of the others emerged? There are a host of disparate elements combining in Blackfish City, from the floating city where it’s set to the idea of humans neurally linked to animals to a decades-long grudge hearkening back to the fall of New York City.

I talked with Miller about the novel’s genesis and its connection to present-day politics. Miller’s novel centers around a series of ostensibly unconnected characters, until their plotlines begin to converge in unexpected ways the result is a powerful and unique glimpse of the near future. Miller‘s new novel, boasts one of the most intriguing science fictional settings I’ve run across in a long time: Qaanaaq, a floating city in the Arctic in which new societal orders are formed, old grudges burn brightly, and a host of mysteries await their solutions.

Blackfish city sam j miller