Review: The Saturn Effect: Alpha
A group of large space stations orbit Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, prized for its wealth of natural resources and a potential candidate for terraforming.
Two years ago one of the stations was deliberately destroyed...
Alpha has a piece of advanced technology fixed to his left arm; it is of Martian design, given to him by his father. His parents are dead now, and he is alone with his sister Ri.
Enhanced is a Modified (or 'mutie'), taking part in a protest. She is risking her life; the security forces are prepared to use deadly force to quell the demonstration.
Bones is a Pure, watching the protest from afar with his brother Glass. The Pure see themselves as racially superior to all other forms of life - especially muties - but when Bones and Glass get caught up in the ensuing mêlée, it is the time for some very odd alliances to be made...
The Saturn Effect: Alpha by writer Chris Moses and artist Francesco Mazzoli is a complex action drama set against a dizzying, high-tech backdrop. The space station is huge, bustling city with towering buildings and warrens of backstreets. The moon Titan is a hostile, toxic environment full of lethal hazards. But the greatest danger is from the human forces at play: the oppressive powers-that-be and the hidden figures that move behind the scenes.
Mazzoli's art is freely energetic with vibrant figures and expansive space vistas. There is a great feeling of movement running through the story with characters running, jumping and fighting, camera drones swooping around to zoom in on the riot, spacecraft and hover-bikes racing through alien environments.... And, of course, plenty of things exploding. The reader is not left standing still for more than a heartbeat, and the artwork pulls you along for the ride.
There's more than whizz-bang on offer here, though; we have an intricately-layered story of politics, corruption, the ghosts of war, racism and diversity; people from different backgrounds uniting across social barriers to battle a common enemy...
The deeper narrative is a dense one and the reader may feel somewhat bewildered by the series of bizarre occurrences, but patience will be rewarded. This is a richly-detailed universe with multiple threads running through the shadows, revelations waiting to be exposed, to throw everything into turmoil.
The first two issues hint tantalisingly at more startling developments to come, things that open up the story to more startling, exotic possibilities... But will our heroes survive the fallout?
Read the prequel FREE: The Saturn Effect: Ajax
Zak Webber
Zak Webber
Twitter - @sfcomicartist / Instagram - @sfcomicartist
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