Geek Syndicate
The story itself suffers a little through the sheer weight of exposition. When it eventually comes, Caleb’s mission is a real trial by fire – attempting to get an unauthorised Isolationist human colony to up stakes – but the bulk of this first volume is taken up with explaining who Caleb is, how the human race is viewed by the Confederation, the history of the Human/Sandjarr war and showing us around the IDO on Orbital, their base of operations. In other words there’s an awful lot of world building and not a lot of story, per say. Neither of the main characters are particularly well-developed by the end of this first volume but we get enough beats to understand that Caleb is noble and troubled, while Mezoke is talented but taciturn. I was expecting a more explosive mixture but the personal drama seems to be in their combined efforts against prejudice rather than against each other. It makes for a decent working partnership - but not a classic one as yet. One element I enjoyed was the fact that Mezoke looks like a female but could quite possibly be male. Like Pratchett’s dwarves, Sandjarr sexuality is kept very private indeed. It engenders a nice little discomfort in the hetero-male reader about eyeing up exotic ladies. It also makes for a neat touch that many of the humans we meet are, if not reprehensible, at least a little unsavoury. The bar-tender is a good example, spouting poisonous remarks in a poorly judged conversation with Caleb. It’s a good mirror to hold up to ourselves and easy to apply to how we think about foreign peoples and the wider world beyond our walls. Over all I’m pretty pleased with Orbital. The future feels realistic in terms of the multiplicity of people. Of course there are still bigots and lowlifes, terrorists and scum. Just like there are still decent people trying to make things a little better in whatever way they can. There are grafters, ambassadors, policemen and everything between – all trying to make sense of the new world they find themselves in. I hope that future volumes will step a little farther from the human sphere, or at least have us in a less concentrated mass, if only so we can explore what else is out there. There is so much promise to this series, it’d be a shame for it to just focus on human colonies. Some of Cinebook’s first volumes have been doubled up with the second – e.g. The Scorpion, Insiders, Largo Winch. As a marketing strategy it was ultimately unsuccessful but I can’t help feeling that Orbital would really benefit from that extra story-telling space. For one thing, when the mission finally does get going, things really kick off, with an infestation that could easily be Mike Mignola’s redesign of the Aliens franchise. These things are skin-crawlingly hideous, fast and utterly inhuman. The excreta hits the extractor and by the final panel you’ll be raging as to why it has to stop there. Well it doesn’t of course, because the next three volumes are available right now, with a fifth due out on October 17th 2013. I’ll be picking up a few of them at Thought Bubble this year. I think you should, too.
Dion Winton-Polak
Rating
G G G GG
A three page preview of Orbital Volume One starts on the next page.
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