4,5 ( )

The art is amazing as always, but these stories show some of Moebius' weaknesses as an author. Sci fi writers often fall into the trap of trying to have their characters explain things that the author, himself does not understand. Of course, no author can presume to know precisely how a warp drive will be used, if we ever do. Yet, authors still behave as if they did.

It's one thing to have a writer with a scientific background, such as Asimov or Niven writing complex explanations, but such speculation from a lay person is only going to distract any reasonably-informed reader. Even 'Hard Sci Fi' authors tend to be content to let their technology stand on its own, recognizing that any attempt to explicate the unknown is doomed to failure.

And what's more, Moebius is not content to explain only scientific unknowns, but must also give us an earful of his spiritual expertise, which usually boils down to 'use the force', except with more unnecessary profundity.

This obsession with a moralizing message often undermines the simple joy and drive of his art and stories. One story becomes a pamphlet for eating a raw food diet, a message which seems unimportant and unrelated to the grander questions the story explores.

Moebius also simplifies and overstates his case (admitting as much in the introduction), which should make any author recall the adage that 'if you cannot explain something without resorting to oversimplification and hyperbole, then you don't really understand it'.

I have no problem with Moebius writing a myth that explores the human condition, but when it is portrayed as authoritative or as an advert, I feel the author is insulting my intelligence. Every author should have the humility to recognize their boundaries and to remain within them. Knowing your boundaries does require constantly pushing and testing them, but the most errant faltering steps should be excised from a finished work.

This over-stepping often shows itself in sci fi through the character dialogue about their future world. The characters constantly marvel at everyday things, explaining them to everyone in ear shot:

"I will enter the search term into the web search engine, Google.com, which will then comb through millions of entries to find the article we need"

"Oh, look! It has already finished, and in only 2-3 seconds time!"

"What an age we live in."

And so on. This is a sign that the author doesn't understand the world or the technologies they are writing about, and hence, cannot figure out how to tell us how they work without pure, unnatural exposition.

A good sci fi story should allow the technologies to seem natural to the characters, but still make the general effects clear to us. Hell, most people nowadays couldn't explain how Google works.

The less serious stories don't always fare better, either, as they often have no point at all. Moebius rarely escapes the extremes of absurd nonsense and grandiose allegory, but one can at least find interesting human stories between his wild vacillations (most of the time). ( )