Book #16: Blackfish City
Cli-fi option 2.
Hi friends! This is Book Club for the Planet, an online community for us to read about the climate crisis in community.
Meeting for this book is Sunday, October 23 at 2 pm EST.
Your second fiction read of the year is also a reader’s choice! As with the Spring option, read one book or read both—we’ll have two separate book club meet-ups (planning them to be back-to-back, on Sunday, Oct. 23) to discuss each of them separately. Both of our Fall picks are futuristic sci-fi and fantasy stories set in what can best be described as the area currently known as Canada and weave together Indigenous voices and mythologies.
Grist has put together an excellent “Definitive Climate Fiction Reading List” and there were a few that I hadn’t read, including Blackfish City by Sam Miller. I was immediately drawn in by the setting—a floating city in the Arctic Circle, built after “the climate wars,” that’s crumbling from decay and corruption. And then, a strange visitor arrives at the city—a woman riding an orca, with a polar bear at her side—and changes everything. The author is LGBTQIA+ and I hope some queer themes show up in this book!
Everyone is welcome to join our book club meet-ups, whether you’ve finished the book or not, and to engage in whatever way feels right to you. Maybe you’re coming to connect with others and work through these questions with a sympathetic sounding board, or maybe you’re coming to learn in a listen-only mode. You are welcome here! Our meetings last for 1 hour, but it’s totally ok to come for the first 30-45 minutes if that works for you.
For those who are new to our meetings, here’s how it works:
A few days before our meeting, I send out a separate Mailchimp newsletter with a Zoom registration link. Please register so I can plan appropriately for the size of our expected group. If you have unsubscribed to that newsletter (life happens and my email inbox perpetually has over 5,000 unread emails in it, so I get it!), please also make sure to unsubscribe to this Substack as well so I don’t accidentally re-subscribe you to the Mailchimp newsletter when I’m updating the lists every other month.
That’s it, for now! Happy reading!