Miller, Sam J
Entry updated 26 June 2023. Tagged: Author.
(1979- ) US author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Haunting Your House" in The Red Volume: An Anthology of Stories by the Awkward Robots (anth 2008 ebook) edited by The Awkward Robots, most of his early work being fantasy or horror, though his first novel, the Young Adult The Art of Starving (2017), Equipoisally offers hints as well of an sf explanation for the mysterious Superpowers acquired by the young protagonist, who has gone on a prolonged fast. This novel won the Andre Norton Award (see Nebula) for young-adult fiction.
Miller's second novel, Blackfish City (2018), is set in Quaanaaq, a highly urban Keep floating in a Near Future Arctic Circle awash with free water due to Climate Change; the tale takes place a little later than "Calved" (September 2015 Asimov's), where its creation is depicted. The world now kept at bay by the inhabitants of this City is Dystopian on familiar though Infodump-heavy lines; but not unexpectedly a visitor, in this case a woman "nanobonded" to an orca and a polar bear, exposes flaws and stresses threatening the inherently precarious refuge from planetary consequence. Blackfish City won the John W Campbell Memorial Award. A mysterious shared Amnesia links the two young protagonists of Destroy All Monsters (2019), one of whom increasingly spends his time in what may be a Parallel World or a delusion; in the end, the young man and the young woman rescue each other. The gay protagonists of The Blade Between (2020) attempt to save their small upstate New York town from developers and supernatural forces conspiring to stifle its spirit.
His collection Boys, Beasts & Men (coll 2022) won a Locus Award as best collection. [JC]
Sam Joshua Miller
born Hudson, New York: 7 February 1979
works
- The Art of Starving (New York: HarperTeen, 2017) [hb/Matt Blease]
- Blackfish City (New York: Ecco, 2018) [hb/]
- Destroy All Monsters (New York: HarperTeen, 2019) [not related to the 1968 film of the same name: pb/Nathan Burton]
- The Blade Between (New York: Ecco/Harper Collins, 2020) [hb/]
- Kid Wolf and Kraken Boy (Nottingham, Nottinghamshire: Solaris, 2022) [pb/]
collections and stories
- The Future of Hunger in the Age of Programmable Matter (New York: Tor.com, 2017) [story: ebook: first appeared 18 October 2017 Tor.com: na/Goñi Montes]
- Let All the Children Boogie (New York: Tor.com, 2021) [story: ebook: first appeared 6 January 2021 Tor.com: na/J Yang]
- Boys, Beasts & Men (San Francisco, California: Tachyon, 2022) [coll: pb/Jennifer O'Toole]
nonfiction
- Horror after 9/11: World of Fear, Cinema of Terror (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 2011) with Aviva Briefel [nonfiction: hb/]
links
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