Mercury Heat #1 - "The Long, Slow Dawn"

[laughing_tree]

"I like the genre [of post-apocalyptic fiction] but its predominance spoke to something else -- a culture with an inability to imagine a future. Post-apocalyptic fiction is literally giving up, saying it's all over and a complete abdication of trying to imagine how the future could be. What's the best riposte to that? I decided that it wasn't actually utopian sci-fi. That's merely its inversion. It was to create a future where we've managed to deal with several of what presently seem as insurmountable problems... but a world where there's a whole separate bunch of problems to deal with. There will be a future. It will have problems in it. We will have to deal with them. Grow up." -- Kieron Gillen



"Just as long as you can keep moving."















While sniffing for clues, they're attacked by two would-be hitmen. The attackers flee, and Luiza gives chase.

Comments

[informationgeek]

Ah yes. This comic. This first issue was bad. Just soooooo boring and an incredibly generic "bad-ass" protagonist, with some of Avatar's usual charm (like gratuitous violence shown just a few pages not to long after this entry).

[doodleboy]

Wish the art didn't put the character in a grimace in all situations... The thing that's immediately strikes me compelling about the character is that she actually wants to help people, she just has a hyper-aggressive personality. A bit of acting would do loads to help that.

[thatnickguy]

This...looks awfully generic and underwhelming.

[informationgeek]

I read and reviewed the first issue. You are right the money. So damn generic and empty.

[halloweenjack]

to create a future where we've managed to deal with several of what presently seem as insurmountable problems... but a world where there's a whole separate bunch of problems to deal with.

Has Gillen heard of Star Trek? That's a persistent problem that I have with his work; it's clever, but not really as clever as he seems to think it is.

[laughing_tree]

Star Trek would definitely fall under the "utopian sci-fi" he mentions. Humanity's completely eliminated war and discrimination among itself (though it still exists from non-human, external threats), and money doesn't even exist anymore because everyone work for self-betterment. The entire planet's united and part of a larger, peaceful union of alien species. During The Next Generation's early seasons, the writers were even forbidden from having conflict between the human characters because the idea was that the species would have evolved past that sort of stuff.

Ask a group of Star Trek fans why they like the show, and you're bound to hear talk of how the franchise envisions a better humanity.

It's pretty much as close to a utopia as you're likely to get in serial fiction, where the very nature of drama means there needs to be *some* source of conflict.

[halloweenjack]

Star Trek would definitely fall under the "utopian sci-fi" he mentions. Humanity's completely eliminated war and discrimination among itself (though it still exists from non-human, external threats), and money doesn't even exist anymore because everyone work for self-betterment. The entire planet's united and part of a larger, peaceful union of alien species. During The Next Generation's early seasons, the writers were even forbidden from having conflict between the human characters because the idea was that the species would have evolved past that sort of stuff.

And then Roddenberry's grip on the franchise loosened, and you had the Borg, a new and almost existential threat to the Federation's very existence; Star Trek VI, which had a faction within Starfleet conspiring against the rest of it in order to perpetuate the cold war with the Klingons; Deep Space Nine, in which yet another interstellar war caused a lot of people within Starfleet and the Federation to question how far they were willing to compromise their ethics to save themselves; a group in DS9 and Voyager called the Maquis that was not only in political opposition to the mainstream Federation, but willing to commit terrorist acts to get their way; etc. And even some of the more mundane aspects of the show mirrored the whole new-problems-have-replaced-the-old-ones theme; take disease, for example. Cancer and a number of other problematic diseases of our era have been cured, but both Jean-Luc Picard (of the future) and Spock's dad had very Alzheimer-ish alien diseases that were incurable; Kirk was allergic to the miracle drug that is used to treat nearsightedness, and needs glasses.

It's not exaggerating to say that, for at least half of the franchise's existence, the idea that threats to humanity's existence in Star Trek were almost purely external simply hasn't been the status quo. And, as sagrada notes below, there are lots and lots of other examples in SF that cover much of the ground between dystopias and utopias.

[laughing_tree]

I didn't say all threats were external, just all sources of war and discrimination. I'm sure there have been exceptions here and there because there a bazillion episodes, but by and large it's stuck to that vision of humanity.

Like I said earlier, of course there's going to be lots of sources of conflict in Star Trek, and in pretty much all so-called utopian fiction. Fiction rely on conflict, drama relies on high stakes. So you're not going to get literal utopias, just worlds where overall you can still say "society's definitely gotten better," which you can certainly do for Trek. (Likewise, a work's not disqualified from being dystopian just because its world isn't a complete shithole. I'd say most cyberpunk is dystopian, what with the genre's focus on evil megacorporations.) Heck, you'd be hard-pressed to find an article or essay about the franchise's appeal that *doesn't* bring up its optimistic, idealistic view of the future.

[halloweenjack]

That's goalpost-moving. if you're allowing that Trek's society isn't a "literal utopia", then my point stands--most SF, including its most popular franchises, occupies many more shades of grey than Gillen allows for. (In fact, even TOS made the point, more than once, that a literal utopia may be impossible; over and over again, the Enterprise visited a planet that had created a utopian society for itself, but always at the cost of something vitally important, usually personal freedom or evolution as a species or whatever.)

[laughing_tree]

I think you're treating the terms "dystopian" and "utopian" sci-fi far more literally than the way most people use the terms. There are more light-hearted stories and moments featuring Batman than any of us will ever read, but we know what people mean when they say he's a dark character.

[stolisomancer]

He wanted to write something in reaction to dystopian science fiction (specifically what was available in 2008), but instead of writing about a utopia, he decided he'd write a book that was simply a future, where current problems have been solved but have been replaced with new ones. Specifically, this is a story about criminal wrongdoing in a lethal environment, as humans work to turn Mercury into an energy farm; he calls it a "sci-fi version of a cyberpunk present" in the full version of the afterword.

The afterword is much longer than the paragraph of it that's quoted here and goes into his thought process; apparently this book has been on the drawing board in one way or another for seven years.

[sagrada]

Even better comparison: Babylon 5. Sure it has an ultimate end of humanity transcending all problems, but for most of the series it's about how people and their differing perspectives, desires and fears destroy any hope of an earthly paradise, even really powerful, smart or energy beings people.

Or 2001: A Space Odyssey, where 50 years after an explosion of love and cultural integration the world is still in the Cold War, the universe is still dark, cold and forbiddingly vast, our skill with creating new minds is crippled by lack of understanding of those minds, and humans are practically curiosities being prodded by inscrutable aliens.

Or Moon, where we're still dealing with corporate misconduct and personal fragility despite being able to extract miracle fuels from Earth's satellite.

Or...really, anything cyberpunk, anything about the future, is about how we still have problems there and still need to think about what we're doing. I don't read sci-fi novels(besides REALLY old stuff like Skylark), so sadly I can't bring up any, but I understand that's a nearly ubiquitous theme in future-fiction.

[thezmage]

Post-apocalyptic fiction is not about giving up, it's about dealing with change. With some exceptions (most zombie stuff, the Road), post-apocalyptic fiction never stops with everything being horrible. It's about dealing with change and realizing that, no matter how bad things look, there's always hope. It's why it's so popular these days with teenagers: their lives are about to change completely and irrevocably, and they need to realize that that's not inherently a bad thing.

[doodleboy]

It depends on the apocalypse I suppose.

I remember Stephen King talking about the Stand. When he first came up with the idea.

"the vision [i]s also strangely optimistic. No more energy crisis, for one thing, no more famine, no more massacres in Uganda, no more acid rain or hole in the ozone layer."

Which is a bit like trying to cure a sickness by killing the patient but eh.

Attack on Titan kind of took this idea apart. It's foreshadowed the the reason the Titan apocalypse happened was as part of a plan to create a peaceful society. But since humans are humans, the manga takes time to show all the various problems the remaining human society has.

Than again I'm still a bit iffy on Attack on Titan's politics, given Isayama's nationalistic views.