The Descender series, Issues 1 - 16
Jeff Lemire, illustrations by Dustin Nguyen
Image Comics
Fiction, Graphic Novel/Sci-Fi
***** (Great)
DESCRIPTION: The United Galactic Council used to bring order - or a reasonable cross-species facsimile thereof - to the Megacosm of inhabited worlds... until the day the Harvesters arrived. The massive robots appeared above the nine core UGC worlds mysteriously, and brought untold destruction. Afterwards, most sentients turned on the robots in their midst, giving rise to scrapper bounty hunters and anti-robot cults. Even the most benign of machines found themselves hunted, sent into death arenas or hurled, still active, into melting pits. Meanwhile, the UGC still reels and crumbles, while the violently luddite Gnishian empire grows bolder.
Tim-21 was built as a companion for the boy Andy on a remote mining world. When the Harvesters struck, he was "asleep" - powered down - and left behind. He "wakes" a decade later, alone among corpses... save for Bandit, a robot "dog", and Driller, a relic mining machine with no love for the living. His attempts to find out what happened to Andy alert scrappers to his existence - and alert the UGC to his survival. They've become very interested in the Tim line of robots, ever since their mechanical "fingerprints" were matched to the Harvesters. Did they bring the death machines to the Megacosm... and will a Tim unit bring them back to finish the devastation they started?
This deluxe edition includes issues 1 - 16 of the Descender series, plus bonus cover art.
REVIEW: The exploration of artificial life has been fertile soil for storytellers since before Mary Shelly unleashed Frankenstein's creature on the literary world. These explorations vary in depth and success. Descender counts as a strong success.
Tim-21 straddles a line between machine and human; he is aware of his own artificial nature and programming, aware that much of what he does and says is the result of his inventor, yet his adaptations and exposure to people (good and bad) make him something more, if not quite human then no longer quite machine. Other machines attempt to cope with their nature in their own ways, all disrupted by the Harvesters and subsequent hunting and reacting in different ways. None of them truly aspire to humanity, yet they view their own lives as worthy of preservation, even if they disagree on the worth and best use of that life.
On the living side of the cast are Doctor Guon, once hailed a genius for his work on robotics (particularly the breakthrough Tim line) before being reviled by association, and Telsa, the half-human daughter of the human head of the UGC who has her own reasons for wanting to track down Tim-21, among a host of others. Living or mechanical (or somewhere between), all have deeper characterizations and motivations driving their actions, all scarred to certain degrees... often long before the Harvesters turned the whole galaxy upside down.
With excellent artwork and a fast-paced plot, Descender starts what looks to be an excellent, gritty space opera in a galaxy closer to Mos Eisley than the United Federation of Planets (if I may mix my sci-fi universes.) I look forward to seeing where the tale goes from here... especially if other volumes are also available via Hoopla.
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