Review: Venus Rises - Exordium
Earth is our past.
Mars is our present.
Venus is our future.
In the near future, Earth is devastated by a chain of cataclysmic events leading to a pandemic collapse of governments. The human race narrowly escapes Earth with technology amassed by mega-corporations, and colonizes Mars and Venus. As Venus becomes home to the working class, and Mars the seat of power, long-running political and cultural clashes return. Talk of revolution permeates the ether. Humankind finds itself once again at the crossroads of extinction as... VENUS RISES.
Terry Holden is captain of the salvage vessel Cattywompus, owned by the mighty Shirokawa Corporation, subcontracted to the Inner Planet Transport Association. In orbit of Venus they receive a distress call from a passenger ship that is stranded without power after being hit by a micrometeroid. The Cattywompus takes the job and heads in to offer assistance.
In the Eurybia city dome on Mars, Hollister Pelt prepares for an important meeting. He is an asset protection enforcer with the Shirokawa Corporation. The company is facing bankruptcy since their mines on Venus stopped producing ore. Pelt has a possible solution; evidence that the mining vessel Ikarus - which went missing many years ago - crashed on Earth, a now lifeless planet. The ore on board is worth a fortune...
Meanwhile, engineer Ash of the Cattywompus has just repaired the damage to the passenger ship when another vessel appears... and it is far from friendly.
After Pelt's meeting with the board, a flock of drones surround the Shirokawa building, seeking out the CEO. Could this be an attack on the megacorporation? Who would dare?
Venus Rises by writer J. G. Birdsall and artists Thomas Garbarini, James Newell and Adam Stone is an action thriller and political drama set in a future where exploitation and oppression by the super-rich elite threatens to destabilise humanity's fragile survival.
This is also something very rare: a 'hard sci-fi' comic. No magically implausible technology, no aliens, no conveniently Earth-like worlds... If you like the science in your fiction to be accurate, here it is. Fans of near-future dramas like The Expanse will feel at home here; the realities of space travel and colonisation - inconvenient limitations to your mainstream space opera - offer fascinating authentic aspects to the narrative.
Another bonus here is making Venus the focus of the story. The good old Red Planet gets so much attention that we tend to forget about Earth's nearest neighbour. Back in the Golden Age of sci-fi, of course, the whole solar system was considered a source of exotic alien characters, and the world named after the Roman goddess of love could easily be home to surreal Amazonian beauties.... As writers began to acknowledge the real conditions of our 'local' planets, however (Venus being a literal vision of hell with clouds of burning sulphuric acid), attention shifted outwards.
It is therefore refreshing to have a story that is rooted a little closer to home for a change and sees the real science as something to be explored rather than ignored. There is something quite satisfying about building a story around what actually works and finding fertile ground for dramatic potential there.
The artists take delight in the nuts-and-bolts details of this day-after-tomorrow arena, giving the panels a textured feel. The gritty Cattywompus is contrasted with the sleek architecture of the elite Martian city, but even there the reader still feels rooted in authenticity: that high-tech, self-contained environment is very fragile...
As is human life and human society. Here again we revisit that old faithful trope: the inevitability that, as we expand outwards from Earth in search of pastures new, we cannot help but export all of our all-too-human moral imperfections with us. Where there is wealth there will always be greed. Where there is plenty there will nevertheless always be exploitation and poverty. This is no Starfleet Utopia: corporate and political corruption are the eternal survivors of the dying Earth.
Captain Holden is ethically torn by the choices she has to make to protect that which is precious to her. Hollister Pelt soon discovers that his ingenuity has thrown him into the middle of a conflict he never anticipated and for which he is terminally ill-suited...
Is there any hope of surviving long enough to do what is right? And what will be the cost?
VENUS RISES
Zak Webber
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