Sam J. Miller
Author of Blackfish City
About the Author
Sam J. Miller is an American author, based in New York. He writes novels and short stories in science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres. Before becoming a writer, he worked as a butcher, guitarist in a punk rock band, and a painter's model. He was co-editor of the anthology, Horror After 9/11. show more His other work includes Blackfish City, and The Art of Starving, which won the 2017 Nebula Awards, Andre Norton Award for young adult science-fiction and fantasy. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Series
Works by Sam J. Miller
Calved 6 copies
Last Gods 3 copies
Bodies Stacked Like Firewood 3 copies
Associated Works
A People's Future of the United States: Speculative Fiction from 25 Extraordinary Writers (2019) — Contributor — 539 copies, 20 reviews
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Third Annual Collection (2016) — Contributor — 189 copies, 2 reviews
The Very Best of the Best: 35 Years of The Year's Best Science Fiction (2019) — Contributor — 180 copies, 1 review
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection (2017) — Contributor — 147 copies, 4 reviews
The Long List Anthology: More Stories From the Hugo Award Nomination List (2015) — Contributor — 126 copies, 6 reviews
Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 61 • June 2015 (Queers Destroy Science Fiction! special issue) (2015) — Contributor — 112 copies, 3 reviews
We Mostly Come Out at Night: 15 Queer Tales of Monsters, Angels & Other Creatures (2024) — Contributor — 68 copies
We Will Rise Again: Speculative Stories and Essays on Protest, Resistance, and Hope (2025) — Contributor — 61 copies, 1 review
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Ten (2016) — Contributor — 59 copies, 3 reviews
The Long List Anthology Volume 3: More Stories from the Hugo Award Nomination List (2017) — Contributor — 59 copies
Recognize Fascism: A Science Fiction and Fantasy Anthology (2020) — Contributor — 38 copies, 7 reviews
The Long List Anthology Volume 6: More Stories from the Hugo Award Nomination List (2020) — Contributor — 30 copies, 2 reviews
The Long List Anthology Volume 8: More Stories from the Hugo Award Nomination List (2022) — Contributor — 15 copies, 1 review
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction November/December 2019, Vol. 137, Nos. 5 & 6 (2019) — Contributor — 10 copies
The Red Volume 1 copy
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Birthdate
- 1979-02-07
- Gender
- male
- Occupations
- butcher
community organizer
author
editor - Awards and honors
- John W. Campbell Memorial Award (2019)
- Agent
- Seth Fishman [literary]
Debbie Deuble Hill [film & TV] - Nationality
- USA
- Places of residence
- Hudson, New York, USA
New York, New York, USA - Associated Place (for map)
- New York, USA
Members
Reviews
This is a delightful read. The investment you make in the first 100 pages pays off in a rich, enfolding experience of very able, capable worldbuilding by Author Miller.
Four PoV characters seems like a lot, I know, but each presents the reader with a different lens on a world that is all about where you are in its hierarchy as to what it looks like, feels like, and how Qaanaaq functions to meet your needs. Wealthy and privileged and bored Fill and Kaev, males at opposite ends of the city's show more caste system, and Kaev the professional fight-thrower is about to slip a few more rungs down the ladder. Ankit and non-binary Soq are the mobile middle-dwellers, each functioning in their differing-status jobs to support the power structure. Soq the messenger, the Mercury of Qaanaaq, was probably my favorite PoV in the book. The stealth they possess; the invisibility that rejecting binaries confers on them; all the moments of revelation this leads to make them a character I'd've loved to hear more from.
Author Miller is a top-notch talent, a maker of archetypes and a weaver of worlds whose skills are already as sharp as many with much longer résumés. What points of complaint I have are negligible compared to the central, overarching concerns he presents in this three-year-old and already timeless title.
Some of my favorite lines:
Four PoV characters seems like a lot, I know, but each presents the reader with a different lens on a world that is all about where you are in its hierarchy as to what it looks like, feels like, and how Qaanaaq functions to meet your needs. Wealthy and privileged and bored Fill and Kaev, males at opposite ends of the city's show more caste system, and Kaev the professional fight-thrower is about to slip a few more rungs down the ladder. Ankit and non-binary Soq are the mobile middle-dwellers, each functioning in their differing-status jobs to support the power structure. Soq the messenger, the Mercury of Qaanaaq, was probably my favorite PoV in the book. The stealth they possess; the invisibility that rejecting binaries confers on them; all the moments of revelation this leads to make them a character I'd've loved to hear more from.
Author Miller is a top-notch talent, a maker of archetypes and a weaver of worlds whose skills are already as sharp as many with much longer résumés. What points of complaint I have are negligible compared to the central, overarching concerns he presents in this three-year-old and already timeless title.
Some of my favorite lines:
Money is a mind, the oldest artificial intelligence. Its prime directives are simple, it's 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.show less
–and–
The American fleet had lacked a lot of things—food, shelter, fuel, civil liberties—but it hadn’t lacked weapons. The global military presence that had made the pre-fall United States so powerful, and then helped cause their collapse, had left them with all sorts of terrifying toys.
–and–
“Fine line between good business and a fucking war crime,” he said. “Ain’t that the goddamn epitaph of capitalism.”
"Boys, Beasts & Men" caught me by surprise, turning out to be a set of more literary and satisfying stories than I'd expected from the descriptions. While there are homosexual characters and themes in most of the stories and it's certainly fair to call this collection 'Queer Fiction,' it would be totally facile and reductionist to leave it at that; Miller has a very aware and painterly voice, crafting captivating tales of alienation, loneliness, and hidden natures, of being the voice of That show more Which Is Other, those Outside-Looking-In. Really, his stories -- while more masculine in tone and gay at heart -- hit like classic Joni Mitchell songs in terms of the images and impulses voiced. In the acknowledgements, Miller cites Ray Bradbury as a major, early influence on his writing and that is evident; the light and dark creatures of human nature breathe within everyone and the stories are the fora in which they play out their parts, with swaths of the fantastical woven through the mundane and everyday. He also threads a unifying, interstitial story through "B,B&M" very reminiscent of that around Bradbury's own certain man of many tattoos.....
All of these stories affected me on an emotional level, if not all the same flavor of emotion, but that alone alerts me that this was not just an ordinary read. "Conspicuous Plumage" and "Ghosts of Home" had the strongest immediate impact, partly wistful and partly grief, but the two-sided coin that is the pair "Calved" and "When Your Child Strays From God" lit up my empathy boards; as a dad, it's tough to read those two. I not only recommend this collection to anyone with an interest in urban-SFF, light horror, or human psychology itself, but think that any of these stories would work brilliantly as discussion fodder for bringing xenophobes around to empathetic awareness of others.
And Miller is right about one other thing: you can make just about any story better by adding a dinosaur. show less
All of these stories affected me on an emotional level, if not all the same flavor of emotion, but that alone alerts me that this was not just an ordinary read. "Conspicuous Plumage" and "Ghosts of Home" had the strongest immediate impact, partly wistful and partly grief, but the two-sided coin that is the pair "Calved" and "When Your Child Strays From God" lit up my empathy boards; as a dad, it's tough to read those two. I not only recommend this collection to anyone with an interest in urban-SFF, light horror, or human psychology itself, but think that any of these stories would work brilliantly as discussion fodder for bringing xenophobes around to empathetic awareness of others.
And Miller is right about one other thing: you can make just about any story better by adding a dinosaur. show less
The first book of Sam J. Miller's I read, The Art of Starving, was definitely a mixed bag--good on one hand, flawed on the other (review here). In that instance, for me, the flaws won out: the book wasn't sufficiently SFF to satisfy me. Thankfully, that isn't the case here. This book is all in on its science-fictional concept: an Earth deep in the throes of climate change, with refugees and cities flooding and burning, dire enough to get a new name that says it all: the Sunken World. show more Governments are being overthrown and humanity is fleeing to floating cities, in particular an eight-armed city in the newly opened Arctic (because of complete icemelt, one assumes) called Qaanaaq.
This is an exploration of the horrors of climate change, but it's also an indictment of capitalism, the system that has led (and will lead, if humanity doesn't come to its senses and muzzle it) to this worldwide disaster. There is no police or law enforcement presence on Qaanaaq, and the "government," such as it is, consists of a very uneasy balance of shareholders and crime syndicates. The rich live on the upper arms of the city, One through Three, with plenty of food, room and warmth, and the poor live on the lower arms (Six through Eight), stacked worse than sardines, with dozens of people per living space and many with no homes at all, just renting sleeping bubbles for the night. Due to these conditions, there is a sexually transmitted disease called "the breaks" sweeping the city, a poorly understood disease that behaves like a virus but also seems to transmit memories from its previous hosts.
Naturally, this explosive, immoral status quo cannot stand, and the arrival of a woman on a skiff, accompanied by a nanobonded killer whale (a rather clever idea, using nanotechnology to explain what has traditionally been psychically bonded humans and animals, in SF's past) and a polar bear, is just the match to set this smoldering city alight. But we don't get the revolution right away. Instead, we get several viewpoint characters, each with their own storylines and a slow, careful braiding thereof. It's a measure of Miller's skill at characterization that all of these characters held my interest, even when I didn't have the slightest idea how or if they would eventually meet. But about halfway through the book, the death of one of the POV characters snaps everything into place and sets the rest of the plot in motion, and from there on we have a wild, fast-paced ride. The secrets from the past come to the fore, a newfound family is discovered, and those who have created this terrible set of affairs are going down.
I believe this is a standalone story, although a sequel could certainly be written. I do appreciate the tight focus on Qaanaaq--the author could have pulled back to show the wider drowned world, but the horrors of what humans have done to themselves are effectively communicated through implications and the wise use of fragments of backstory alone. This is definitely not a future anyone would wish, and I think books like these are essential in pointing out the hell we will unleash on ourselves if we don't get serious about climate change. show less
This is an exploration of the horrors of climate change, but it's also an indictment of capitalism, the system that has led (and will lead, if humanity doesn't come to its senses and muzzle it) to this worldwide disaster. There is no police or law enforcement presence on Qaanaaq, and the "government," such as it is, consists of a very uneasy balance of shareholders and crime syndicates. The rich live on the upper arms of the city, One through Three, with plenty of food, room and warmth, and the poor live on the lower arms (Six through Eight), stacked worse than sardines, with dozens of people per living space and many with no homes at all, just renting sleeping bubbles for the night. Due to these conditions, there is a sexually transmitted disease called "the breaks" sweeping the city, a poorly understood disease that behaves like a virus but also seems to transmit memories from its previous hosts.
Naturally, this explosive, immoral status quo cannot stand, and the arrival of a woman on a skiff, accompanied by a nanobonded killer whale (a rather clever idea, using nanotechnology to explain what has traditionally been psychically bonded humans and animals, in SF's past) and a polar bear, is just the match to set this smoldering city alight. But we don't get the revolution right away. Instead, we get several viewpoint characters, each with their own storylines and a slow, careful braiding thereof. It's a measure of Miller's skill at characterization that all of these characters held my interest, even when I didn't have the slightest idea how or if they would eventually meet. But about halfway through the book, the death of one of the POV characters snaps everything into place and sets the rest of the plot in motion, and from there on we have a wild, fast-paced ride. The secrets from the past come to the fore, a newfound family is discovered, and those who have created this terrible set of affairs are going down.
I believe this is a standalone story, although a sequel could certainly be written. I do appreciate the tight focus on Qaanaaq--the author could have pulled back to show the wider drowned world, but the horrors of what humans have done to themselves are effectively communicated through implications and the wise use of fragments of backstory alone. This is definitely not a future anyone would wish, and I think books like these are essential in pointing out the hell we will unleash on ourselves if we don't get serious about climate change. show less
I received an early copy of this book from Net Galley, this has not influenced my review.
This book was the best possible version of a short story collection and really shows off the strengths of the genre. If a six star option existed, I would give this book all of them without a moment’s hesitation.
Like a really great box of chocolates, each story in this collection was fantastic, distinct, and memorable, no coconut clusters or teeth-shattering slabs of caramel in here! (Sorry if those show more are your favorites). I could have easily read whole books based on each individual tale.
The stories were enormously diverse and each affected me a different way, but each left their mark and each was a joy to read. This author blends horror, fantasy, mystery, and magic seemingly effortlessly, the way professional athletes or dancers are able to do incredible things that just seem like showing off until you remember the years of work that went into reaching that level.
The author’s range is astounding. From a story where King Kong really walked the earth and died at the foot of the Empire State Building to a retelling of the night of the Stonewall Riot, where oppressed, queer, New Yorkers discover a potent and deadly form of group pyrokenesis, I found myself completely immersed in each new tale from the beginning.
This author is one I’ve heard about for a while but have never read until now. After this truly stunning book I plan on reading his other works and keeping a careful eye on his upcoming projects. show less
This book was the best possible version of a short story collection and really shows off the strengths of the genre. If a six star option existed, I would give this book all of them without a moment’s hesitation.
Like a really great box of chocolates, each story in this collection was fantastic, distinct, and memorable, no coconut clusters or teeth-shattering slabs of caramel in here! (Sorry if those show more are your favorites). I could have easily read whole books based on each individual tale.
The stories were enormously diverse and each affected me a different way, but each left their mark and each was a joy to read. This author blends horror, fantasy, mystery, and magic seemingly effortlessly, the way professional athletes or dancers are able to do incredible things that just seem like showing off until you remember the years of work that went into reaching that level.
The author’s range is astounding. From a story where King Kong really walked the earth and died at the foot of the Empire State Building to a retelling of the night of the Stonewall Riot, where oppressed, queer, New Yorkers discover a potent and deadly form of group pyrokenesis, I found myself completely immersed in each new tale from the beginning.
This author is one I’ve heard about for a while but have never read until now. After this truly stunning book I plan on reading his other works and keeping a careful eye on his upcoming projects. show less
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- Rating
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