Science Fiction in Full Color

It's no surprise to regular Beatrice readers that I'm a comic book fan, so I don't really need to explain how it is that I happened to get into Orbiter, which is essentially a novella by Warren Ellis and Colleen Doran. More specifically, it's the type of science fiction novella that, in purely textual form, wouldn't have been out of place in Analog when I was reading it back in the 1980s...and heck, might still not be, for all I know. Though it's about the space program, Ellis never loses sight of the human motivations, and Doran does a great job of catching the inner conflicts these folks struggle with through her depiction of posture and gesture. I especially love the subdued quality of the ending; if you discount the back page shot, which to me comes across as an endpaper, Ellis and Doran essentially end on a close-up and a line of dialogue that suggest the sheer awesomeness of what the characters are about to experience yet root that moment in a very human, graspable way ... not easy to do when what you're depicting is [SPOILER ALERT] a group of scientists about to joyride a space shuttle outfitted with alien technology to the ends of the universe.

I'd been holding off on the monthly issues of Grant Morrison's The Filth last year specifically because I wanted to tackle it all in one burst. Well, the collection's out now, and it's as mind-blowing as I'd expected and then some. It's about a middle-aged loner who loves his cat finding out that he's really a soldier in the war against the forces of chaos...except he's never really sure that it's not all in his head, and for the longest chunk of time, neither are you. The story builds off the vibe Morrison developed in his years writing The Invisibles, but strips away much of the romanticism (unless you happen to find apocalyptism sexy) and reflects one of his key personal interests:

As a practicing magician for over two decades now, I reached a point over a year ago where I felt it was time to take the terrifying 'Oath of the Abyss' and ascend to the 'grade' of ipssissimus - as it's known in the Aleister Crowley Golden Dawn hierarchical system of magical attainment. This requires undergoing an ordeal, the nature of which amounts to a personality-shattering meditation upon and encounter with the incoherent forces of 'the Dark Side' of the so-called Tree of Life, that is, all the negative states of consciousness available to us as human beings - fear, guilt, shame, hatred, loneliness, sickness, pain etc.. The 7 Dwarves of Horror basically. During the twelve months of actually writing The Filth scripts I was so overwhelmed by these 'dark' forces that I almost committed suicide on several occasions and spent most of the year in a state of intense psychological and physical distress. I can happily say that the ordeal is now over; I was able to process all this negative energy into my writing and emerge from the Land of Shadow changed forever and having attained the highest possible grade of Ceremonial Magic. Big deal.

I shudder to think what this might imply about Seaguy.