Betelgeuse: The Survivors (Includes Betelgeuse: The Expedition)
by Leo
This volume contains parts 7 & 8 of the Aldebaran/Betelgeuse chronicles. I looked at the previous volumes back in September 2009 (review) and I wasn’t exactly enamoured with it:
Aldebaran is pure space-opera, with the growing development of Kim and Mark and the rest of the diverse group set against the fantastical tale of the planet they live on and the mysterious Mantris. It’s a real slow burn of a read, and prone to passages that just play too slowly, with swaths of expositionary text replacing any real plot movement. It’s packed full of accidental meetings, co-incidences replacing plot developments – and it gets annoying at times. So much so that I very much doubt that if I’d just had Volume 1 in front of me I’d actually have considered going out and getting the rest. This one may well be one solely for the dedicated sci-fi and fantasy purists.
But despite that, I’d been intrigued enough to keep going. But with this volume I find myself even more annoyed. Having read the previous 6 parts and following the story, this is nothing more than a holding pattern, a complete lull in the development of the characters and essentially nothing more than a long journey where very little happens. Following the events of Aldebaran, where an alien species called the Mantris gifts eternal life on a group of humans, the focus shifts to the Betelgeuse system where one of the few remaining members of the Mantris test group finds herself marooned as part of a recon mission to investigate the events that led to a colonising spacecraft being lost.
The Mantris gifted human, Kim, leads her survivors to the planet’s surface and immediately finds herself in another hostile environment, full of the strange, potentially deadly alien creatures that have been a feature of the journey so far. But worse than the indigenous population, the surviving members of the colonising spacecraft are proving what we’ve known all along; that humanity spreads itself like a virus, refusing to give up it’s warlike nature, continually splitting into warring factions at the slightest opportunity. So it is on the Betelgeuse planet.
Following their meeting with the two opposing factions of humanity on Betelgeuse, Kim and her group lead an expeditionary mission up river to investigate the mysterious Iums. These creatures hold the key to the possible future colonisation of the planet and are the reason for the division in the coloniser’s ranks. The scientists are convinced that the Iums are of human level intelligence, the more militaristic faction believes them to be an equivalent to Dolphins or Chimps. An truly intelligent indigenous species would rule out planetary colonisation under UN laws. Kim could sway the issue, breaking the deadlock either way and is courted by both groups.
(Kim and her expedition meet the Iums for the first time. What mysteries will they reveal? Sorry, you won’t find out here, maybe next volume? From Betelgeuse The Survivors. Published by Cinebook.)
Kim’s expedition up river to discover more about the Iums leads to more mystery and a reappearance of the Mantris. But this expedition is all too familiar to anyone who has stuck with the series so far. It’s another trip through jungles, rivers, going ooohh at the alien creatures and eventually falling into peril. Pretty much what occurred in parts 3 & 4. It feels very much like Leo hit a block at this stage and merely retrod old ground, waiting for new inspiration to strike. Because in all honesty, very little happens during these volumes. Meet the two groups, establish a little of the politics, go on a journey, stop.
Even the potential interest in the characters of the two groups is mishandled, Leo paints such a broad, stereotyped picture of the opposing groups that it almost becomes a pantomine at times: On the one side we have a near fascist, militaristic group, shooting everything they can, practically enslaving the women of their group to become child-bearing slaves. And on the other we have the enlightened scientists, believing that Betelgeuse’s Iums hold the key to all of the mysteries of the planet and doing everything they can to avoid altering the planet’s ecosystem. It’s all too stereotyped and simplistic.
(How’s that for quick characterisation? Military type group; short tempered, prone to threats, antagonistic and pull a gun at the slightest provocation. From Betelgeuse The Survivors. Published by Cinebook.)
But despite everything I’ve just written, there’s a perverse little part of me that is actually wanting to carry on with the series. Maybe I’m too far into it to turn back now, maybe it has more of a hold on me than I thought, maybe I’m just desperate to find out if Leo can rescue what was a halfway promising bit of Euro Sci-Fi from this pedestrian outing. But next time I’m hoping for a little more than a journey that should have been at least half the length it was.
Thu, Jan 21, 2010
Comics and cartoons, Propaganda, Reviews