Review: Betelgeuse
Teenager Mai Lan lives in a house on the beach with her parents Bert and Phi Anh. It is not the safest place to live - the local wildlife can be dangerous - but life in the canyon, where most people live, also has its drawbacks. When the authorities come for her to take her back to civilization to fulfil her biological duties as a producer of babies, she flees.
Alone, she doesn't stand a chance of escaping. Luckily she has friends in the form of the 'iums', large panda-like animals who turn out to be a lot more intelligent than people think...
Welcome to Betel-Six, the sixth planet of the star Betelgeuse. The planet was colonised six years earlier and - as was the case with the Aldebaran colony - all contact with Earth was mysteriously severed, leaving the intrepid colonists to fend for themselves. Coincidence? Or could there be some unseen connection between these two distant worlds?
In Betelgeuse, writer/artist Léo continues the story that began in the first instalment Aldebaran. Once again we have what is essentially an action/drama with people in 20th century clothes and using mostly 20th century technology, set on a planet that looks a lot like Earth but includes wonderfully surreal plants and animals. It is a neat juxtaposition of the familiar with the strange; characters that the reader can closely identify with set against the Wonderland/Narnia of an alien world.
In orbit above the planet, two people wake from cryogenic hibernation, Inge and Hector. They very soon discover that something has gone terribly wrong with the ship. Not only are all communications down, but all the other hibernation pods have failed. It is a ship full of frozen corpses, and, with no way off, Inge and Hector will eventually join the dead.
But help is on the way: a ship from Aldebaran is en route to investigate the loss of contact. Part of the team is Kim, heroine of the previous volume, now aged twenty-four. Does she hold the key to unlock this enigma?
There are many similarities with Aldebaran here - people on an isolated colony struggling against oppression and tackling the hazards of the native fauna - but here the role of the mysterious mantris is more to the fore in the narrative. As previously we have Léo's finely rendered characters and imaginatively alien animals to delight the eye. The iums are charming creatures, reminiscent of some of the dream-like anime creations of Studio Ghibli... they have more than a touch of Totoro about them; cute and cuddly but also strong and protective.
As before, this is very much a human story set within a fantastical arena, with the added element of the bizarre. We see the new, exciting worlds through the eyes of people like ourselves.
In this second volume of Léo's grand saga we learn a few key facts in the grand scheme, but more remains to be discovered in the continuing stories...
Zak Webber
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