Yesterday was just one of those days where everything seemed to piss me off. A constant string of people bugging me for stuff, or failing to get stuff to me they were supposed to turn in weeks ago, or people not being around when you need them for something. When the weather is as unseasonably nice as it is this week, it makes a person question why the hell he's working.
Anyway, related to comments made during last week's October solicitations post, I did end up tracking down the first two issues of Everfrost.
Van is a scientist on a frozen, dying world, trying to find a way off. Her current approach involves trying to incubate offspring of some immense, star-traveling creature in the bodies of local fauna she killed. With some promising results, she sets off to a place called the Precinct to try and check in with some other researchers she knows. What she finds is that she's somehow been gone much longer than she thinks, and someone is selling clones of her deceased son.
I would suspect this one blonde on the latter, who we see in flashbacks killed an earlier clone of her (their?) son in front of her because someone or something called "Ward" learned what they did. Then Van shoved her husband over the balcony into the ocean, but we know that never kills people.
There are also a couple of factions fighting it out in Ward's apparent absence. The Warlords, who seem to have been servants of Ward and run things in his (or her or their) absence, and The Bloom, who seem to be determined to challenge the Warlords who they feel are hiding some sort of important knowledge. Van knows both groups, but I get the feeling neither is exactly how she remembers, either.
One thing that comes up quite a bit in the first two issues is the difference between how Van categorizes her actions, and how everyone else does. She says she went into the wilderness to find a way everyone could leave the world. Her companion, a talking monkey-like thing, says she came out there to die. Others say she went out there to hide. She asks around about her mother because she was hoping to find some information, her mother (or a computer hologram of her) says she really means she was planning to take whatever she could find. She forms an temporary alliance with The Bloom, and jeopardizes it almost immediately by decapitating one of their lieutenants, who is another clone of her son, and therefore a mole.
But maybe she's wrong, she's been gone a long time, and I wonder if that's going to be the point. That she went off, telling herself it was to save the world, when it ultimately became her turning her back on it, whether that was what she really intended or not. She may have a solution to the problem she knew, but the world hasn't stayed still waiting. There may not be anyone who wants her solution any longer. And Lindsay writes Van as, if not fully aware of that, at least recognizing she's on unfamiliar ground at times. Although her internal narration is a little odd in that she sometimes seems to be telling someone this story, like when she refers to something as being 'the point in the story when.' Other times, it's like she's just talking to herself inside her head. Maybe that's just where she's at mentally. Not unhinged or anything, just out of practice with other people.
Kivela draws the world as almost locked in ice, but the towns and people are a mixture themes and levels. People carrying swords or wearing helmets that wouldn't be out of place in Skyrim, side-by-side with energy shield you can wear on your wrist and little flying robot attack drones and tasers. People on both sides of the Warlord/Bloom divide fly what look like dragons carved from blue marble. Van looks like she's wearing a spacesuit, probably for protection against the cold. The Precinct has some buildings which feel like maybe a Middle Eastern feel, but also more Gothic industrial look. The outskirts consist of thrown together tin structures and big tanker ships that are icelocked.
It's kind of a bizarre hodgepodge, and I'm not sure it gives the story a strong sense of place because the pieces don't necessarily fit together in a coherent whole. But it does suggest a civilization used to one way of doing things, that had to adapt quickly, in whatever ways they could manage. And if I figure Van is supposedly fixated on getting off this world (although she seems more interested in killing all clones of her son) then the places around her don't really matter to her. Just places to get what she can from, then get away.
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