Review: Shangri-La
"We're living in a box, Scott. And the sunlight doesn't make it in. Is that your idea of a paradise? A world where we never know if it's day or night?"
Scott Peon is waiting for the sun to explode.
Not our Sun, a much bigger star, around which orbits a desolate desert planet. A star that should not be there because it is situated in the exact centre of where the Gum Nebula should be. Over a thousand light years from Earth, the Gum Nebula is the remains of a supernova that occurred a million years ago...
Eleven years ago - or, one million years later, depending upon your perspective - Scott is an investigator for Tianzhu Enterprises, looking into a series of mysterious explosions on the corporation's experimental research stations. Tianzhu is the biggest company there is, for one simple reason: it is the only company there is. It owns and runs the huge space station colony that houses the entirety of the human race. Below lies the Earth, uninhabitable for centuries due to environmental collapse.
Life is not so bad on the station. Sure, it's a big ugly cobbled-together box and everyone is both employee and consumer for the corporation, but everyone seems to have everything they need. But not everyone is happy. One of the malcontents is Scott's brother Virgil...
Unrest spreads when the corporation unveils plans for the colonisation of Saturn's moon Titan... but not by humans. They are creating a new race from scratch: homo stellaris. The genetically engineered race will occupy a terraformed Titan on the Shangri-La plain.
For many, this is a betrayal. Why should the overcrowded humans not be given the chance of a new home? And what other secrets are Tianzhu hiding?
Shangri-La by writer/artist Mathieu Bablet is a rich, complex thriller and mystery with a sharp political edge. The orbital colony USS Tianzhu is a totalitarian oligarchy in all but name; the corporation taking the role of Orwell's Big Brother. The populace is kept pacified by a constant stream of new consumer products, the fulfilment of invented needs to which even our hero is not immune: when he passes a store that suddenly offers 50% off everything he joins the desperate mob pouring in: "What do I need? I must need something. A cup-holder! I don't have one of these!"
Bablet's art is a unique blend of his roughly drawn, semi-abstract human figures with finely crafted, highly detailed backgrounds. The extensive interiors of the immense station are exhaustively rendered, somehow creating both a sense of huge space and also an atmosphere of claustrophobia. Countless bodies live, work and play in a gigantic orbital structure which, on the inside, resembles a massive shopping mall. This is no co-incidence, Bablet is depicting a population trapped in a vice-like grip of consumerist control, a living nightmare of mindless battery hens locked into a system that is literally their whole world.
Of course there are tensions which cannot always be mollified by vacuous TV shows or the release of the latest phone. The resistance aims to topple the board of directors in their elite pagoda at the top of the station, but is such a direct revolution even possible when the illusions designed to shackle the masses are so insidious? Nothing is what it appears to be...
The struggle for the destiny of the human race accelerates out of control, threatening disaster. Terrible secrets are exposed, but at what price?
And who will survive to benefit from such knowledge?
Also by Mathieu Bablet: CARBON AND SILICON
Zak Webber
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