If you love Science Fiction, I highly recommend Image. There’s more to them than The Walking Dead and creator-owned superheroes…I think they’ve scaled back on the latter. Below are my overdue plugs I promised two years ago.
Rick Remender (Black Science) returns with my personal favorite called Low. Taking the old scientific terror many of us know; one day the sun will devour the earth (it won’t with 99% certainty now). Remender extrapolates a different distant future in which humanity has retreated to underwater cities due to the surface being too hot; what will really happen according to Astronomers and Astrophysicists.
One such city is Salus. Most of the residents have given up because their air-recycling system is scheduled to fail in approximately six months. Scientist Stel Caine remains optimistic, a rare trait in humanity. She may have lost most of her family to pirates ten years earlier but she remained vigilant, waiting for an ancient space probe to return and report back if it found a new planet capable of supporting human life.
When Stel receives the good news, she negotiates transportation and the release of her son from prison. In exchange, she must accept exile from Salus. The story covers what Stel finds along her treacherous journey underwater and eventually on the surface.
What pulled me in originally was the artwork. Greg Tocchini’s style is intriguing. He captures of the horrors Stel encounters without it be too gory or gross. Doing underwater stuff is also tricky.
Bitch Planet is best described as The Handmaid’s Tale mixed up with No Escape and touches of The Longest Yard. Instead of women being demoted to third-class citizens over fertility as per the Margaret Atwood novel, they’re just demoted in a weird, global corporate patriarchy. Not sure if there’s any religious overtones like Atwood’s dystopia yet it’s certainly one of the futures the Republicans are striving for.
The story begins with a shipment of Non-Compliant women getting shipped off to the prison planet. They’re labeled Non-Compliant for numerous reasons: being overweight, being too uppity or they’re obstructing an unfaithful husband from marrying his younger trophy wife. Due to one prisoner being a former Olympic athlete, the female warden proposes the prisoners form a megaton team (rugby combined with UFC) and play the guards. I can’t remember why this happened but it’s a dystopia filled with misogynists and Phyllis Schafly types.
Alex & Ada takes a different turn on relations between the sexes. With this near future, android companions have been perfected but let’s face it, sexbots will be the goal given growing gender imbalances in parts of China, India and Utah.
Alex is a young man who is depress over his fiancee dumping him so his grandmother buys him one of these new-fangled androids. She loves hers, why not share the joy with Alex. At first, he’s rather reluctant to turn it on and when he does, Ada is rather boring. She’s rather subservient with replies such as “whatever you want to do.”
Annoyed by Ada’s lack of free will, Alex starts to investigating ways to give the android self-awareness and the capability to think for herself…both of which are illegal. I guess he chose to ignore the long and tedious agreement, said “agree” without really thinking it through. His efforts succeed. However, a jealous person rats them out to the FBI and our couple have to flee the country.
Alex & Ada is an intriguing idea because it brings up the debate we’ll eventually have regarding AI creations having any rights like animals.