Who wants to be a cyborg?

[superboyprime]

Mek was a mini-series written by Warren Ellis and drawn by Steve Rolston. It explores the world of body modification fads, with a science-fiction twist.



"Elective cyborging has become an underground subculture in the mode of piercing, branding or tattooing today. The technology used to effect this is called, simply, MEK. Metal fetishism. These aren't your clean-lined cyborgs of videogames and the Six Million Dollar Man. These are weird, spiky, buzzing, sexy, scary, transgressive people. Like any youth culture in its early iteration, it's kind of unsettling...

It began in LA. And deep in the Mek area of LA, RJ COIN, one of the original Mek developers, is shot to death..."









Many years later:

Sarissa returns to Sky Road after ex-boyfriend RJ is murdered there. She wants to get to the bottom of his death.















The police chief tells her that the man behind the killing is Ghost Eddie, a biomechanic who helped Sarissa found the movement.



She kills the guy.

Comments

[box_in_the_box]

Oh, look. Yet another Warren Ellis comic in which characters don't actually engage in dialogue as much as in dueling monologues, which consist of regurgitated sci-fi concepts that countless other authors have explored earlier and better, complete with an Ellisonian protagonist who encourages keeping the world and/or life "interesting."

The irony here is that we're rapidly reaching the point where Ellis' writing fails the Turing test.

[lakrids404]

near future sf don't, have as rule, a long period before the future makes them irrelevant

[box_in_the_box]

There's a difference between writing sci-fi concepts that will expire faster than milk cartons, versus writing the exact same sci-fi concepts that William Gibson did back in the 1980s without adding anything new or worthwhile beyond the dubious merits of all your characters talking like the author.

This shit is to the act of storytelling what Puff Daddy "covering" songs like "Roxanne" is to the world of music.

[lakrids404]

Oh... so the story is not from the eighties ?!

[box_in_the_box]

It was published in 2003.

Anyone who thinks this is a "forward-thinking" story has obviously never read any sci-fi story that has been published in the past 30 years.

[superboyprime]

I'm not much of a science-fiction reader. What do you mean by that? I'd think cybernetic body parts would be a subject like space travel in that it never really gets old. It's like it exists in any substantial way yet.

[khamelea]

"It was published in 2003."

I never would have guessed.

[jarodrussell]

Only if by 80's you mean 2003.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mek_%28comics%29

[cmdr_zoom]

Though you'd be forgiven for thinking so.