Review of
Ignition City,
by Warren Ellis, ISBN 1592910874
Five out of five stars
Dystopian story about space travel
This science
fiction story has many unique and sobering characteristics. In it, humans have
gone into space, but almost everyone has lost interest in what was once a great
dream of humans. It is 1956 and when the story opens, France has just passed a
law where there will be no more space launches from French soil. The space port
in France was the last one in continental Europe and it seems certain that
Britain will soon be closing their last one.
Mary is the
daughter of an astronaut and an astronaut herself and she wants to get back
into space. When her father dies, she travels to Ignition City, the last
spaceport on Earth, in order to settle his affairs. It is an artificial island
in the equatorial Atlantic and under the control of the United States. What
makes this story unusual is that Ignition City is a filthy place, filled with
despair. It would seem contradictory that a spaceport would be like that, but
the author makes the story work.
Mary is a tough
woman, facing down dangers at gunpoint. She is willing to use her weapon and
she is capable of communicating with the crablike creatures that are clearly
alien. Using her wits, brains, her father’s contacts and an itchy trigger
finger, she manages to get a group together that might have the collective
technical skills to get back into space.
The common
approach to space travel in science fiction stories is to make it optimistic, a
positive take on the future. Ellis does the opposite, a world is created where
there is extreme indifference to space flight and how all the people that could
build craft capable of going into space have fallen on hard times. Technology
is a powerful force in the human world, yet we too often assume that it is here
to stay. There are many possible scenarios where the human species decides to
give up complicated aspirations and space programs are one of the most likely
to be rejected.
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