07/24/2006 Archived Entry: "24Seven"

I am currently reading through 24Seven, a “sci-fi/noir” comic book anthology written and drawn by some of the darlings of the indy comix scene. So of course it’s very well made with lots of artsy art, offbeat stories and an overall stellar presentation. It generally gets the “noir” tone of its label right, but when it comes to the “sci-fi” aspect, this book fails miserably. All the stories so far (about ½ way through the book) are your run of the mill short stories in what you would expect from a noir book…except all the main characters and their pets are robots. That’s it. That’s all that makes this book “sci-fi”.

None of the stories truly make use of the fact that the characters are robots (there is one scene where a robot gets a tattoo removed…using a grinder), they behave, are built, live, and have social structures identical to ours. If you went and redrew all of these stories to feature humans, you could hardly tell the difference (sort of the same thing as if you went and replaced all the Vampires and Werewolves in Underworld with regular people). This is NOT what sci-fi is about. Seeing male robots trying to pick up female robots at bars using human tricks is not what I enlisted to see. Robot assassins, robot DJs, robot scalpers, robot cops; all human roles filled with robots who do it the exact same way the humans do it. For example, why would a robot need to carry a tape recorder? His internal memory is likely to be complete and infallible. Why would a robot need to carry a cell phone when something like that could be built in? It’s a waste of a concept, a few changes to the way the robots interacted with their environment and each other would have elevated the material to be worthy of its “sci-fi” label.

Sci-fi short stories in particular are at their best when presenting a unique situation or concept only available to the sci-fi setting. People (or robots) doing mundane things in mundane ways does not qualify. This is a general problem with “mainstream sci-fi”. The more we get away from the hardcore stuff, the more it resembles real-life (for the sake of relate-ability and accessibility) and 24Seven is most definitely in the mainstream side of things and pales in imagination and creativity to other sci-fi anthologies I’ve read.

Replies: 5 comments

Mmh, if the stories themselves are good, as you wrote at the beginning of your post, why bother about the sci-fi aspect of it? I never really thought of sci-fi as a genre in itself, but more as a type of setting in which you fill in the content, the actual story. Of course, it can be a major aspect of the interest you get in reading, but it doesn't have to. The easiest example would certainly be Star Wars, which storyline, despite its cool sci-fi coating, could happen in Rome, Europe during middle-age, China, Middle-East, a fantasy realm of some sort, etc. Noir, adventure, detective stories, epics, romance, etc are all "real" genres to me, which can be fit in any kind of setting. Anyways, all that to say that robots behaving like humans in a noir genre doesn't seem to be all that bad to me.

Posted by Étienne @ 07/25/2006 01:06 PM EST

Relate-ability is no more a word than relatability ;)

Posted by Jenna @ 07/25/2006 08:39 PM EST

It's English, you can make up any word you like!

Posted by Arshwana @ 07/26/2006 09:09 PM EST

I've been told it's always correct to hyphenate things...besides, there are no real words to relate what i'm trying to express there.

My problem with the book is that there's no excuse for it to use robots...it's just a pointless superficiality. I bought it hoping for some cool sci-fi short stories and was not satisfied.

Posted by Rayne @ 07/27/2006 07:55 PM EST

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Posted by Adult Products @ 08/23/2006 05:59 PM EST