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Book Rec: Blackfish City

"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.

What would it take to rival something so powerful? What kind of mind would be required to triumph over this monstrosity? What combination of technology and biology, hope and sickness? How can we who have nothing but the immense magnificent tiny powerless spark of our own singular Self harness that energy, magnify it, make it in something that can stand beside these invisible giants, these artificial intelligences, weighty legal words on parchment and the glimmering ones and zeros of code in a processor somewhere?

You scoff. You say: the idea is hopeless fantasy. But I have found a way. Here, alone, locked up, head shaved and back bowed, I have already begun to tip the scales.


Stories are where we find ourselves, where we find the others who are like us. Gather enough stories and soon you're not alone; you are an army." 

(page 224)

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Our world has split itself at the seams, continents sinking, humans setting fire to their brothers and sisters and everything they've created, but human ingenuity keeps us alive. We've banded together, created a floating city where the remnants of a hundred cultures can barely keep themselves afloat. In this Arctic city, four people, guided by the ever-changing voice of the City Without A Map, trace paths around each other. The fifth is a revolution in the shape of a woman riding an orca, with a polar bear at her side.

Sam J. Miller's incredible new novel Blackfish City tells the story of a future where people meld together, with each other and with nature, to fight back against the things they have brought with them: the greed, the power, the cruelty.  Dystopian sci-fi, urban fantasy, and a retelling of our own myths, featuring a multicultural cast who prove that you can tell the same story even when you speak different languages.



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