Long time, no post! It looks like one review per week is about all I can manage right now. They're more difficult to write than I expected. Not sure why. Anyway, on to the subject of the review: Terra Formars, volumes one and two, by Yu Sasuga and Ken-ichi Tachibana. This review is contains major spoilers for the first volume.
I got this one from my old friend the Las Vegas library system, but I'd been eyeballing it at Barnes and Noble and on Amazon for a while. It's about an attempt to terraform and colonize Mars. At some point (in our near future) scientists introduced two life forms to Mars in order to make it habitable for humanity: algae to introduce oxygen, and cockroaches to eat the algae. Now fast forward a hundred years to the time the story is set, and it's time to send a manned mission to contain the cockroach population so that people can start living there. One expedition has already been sent, but contact was lost and they've never been heard from since. Our Heroes are members of the second expedition.
This is where the spoilers begin, so if you don't want 'em, you might want to skip this one.
What Our Heroes find on Mars are not your average garden-variety cockroach. Exposure to radiation has caused them to mutate into bipedal, humanoid killing machines. They're extremely hostile, fast, hard to kill, and very very good at killing people. Fortunately the mission's crew have undergone some not-too-well-detailed procedure that also gives them some physical characteristics of insects like speed, durability, etc. Still, don't get too attached: most of them are dead by the end of the first volume, when the two survivors beat a hasty retreat to Earth. One of those survivors, Shokichi Komachi, is pivotal in the second volume, set several years later. This one deals with setting up a third manned mission, this time (hopefully) better prepared to deal with the cockroach-people.
I'm of a divided opinion on this one. It hems much more towards the horror genre than anything I normally read (in comics, that is; I have a higher tolerance in pure text). The first volume is in many ways a gore-fest as we watch most of the characters die in abrupt and sometimes bizarre ways, including one character I liked that I was sure would make it out. If I'd had only that volume to go on, I probably would have quit the series. I tend to get attached to characters, and it annoys me when they die for shock value or to reiterate how scary the aliens are. Two or three deaths would have accomplished that for me; a dozen is overkill in the space of one (first!) volume.
However, I'd already rented the second volume, and I'm glad I read it before dismissing the whole series. This one, while still gory, takes a much more character-centric approach and introduces elements that feel like long-term plot. It made me want to keep reading. I get the sense that the authors really like cliffhangers, because this book ends on a big one, but I found myself actually invested in seeing it resolved. I think they've got me. Only one thing is holding me back, and it's the sense I get that this story probably isn't going to have a happy ending. It just doesn't feel like that kind of plot. I hope I'm wrong, but I'm probably going to put myself through the emotional wringer with this one. Either way, I'm looking forward to getting my hands on volume three.
That's it for today! Next time around I'm planning to review a very different kind of science fiction story. See you then!
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