So, I’ve been trying to reserve judgment on Tom Morello’s “part Suicide Girl and part Joan of Arc” comic, Orchid, until I actually got a look at it, because I have some doubts about the whole badass-sex-worker enterprise as executed by dudes, but Morello has generally good politics. That main character doesn’t show up yet in the preview Dark Horse has released, but that sample did kind of hit on one of my pet peeves: science fiction that’s immediately scientifically ridiculous.
The book starts with the line, repeated elsewhere, that “When the seas rose, genetic codes were smashed.” I realize this is nitpicky as hell, but you know what? Global warming is probably not going to create an alternative to DNA, or human beings wouldn’t be running around in their present form. It’s interesting enough to suggest that dramatic global warming and rising sea levels, say, made the return of giant marine reptiles possible, depending how far we’re supposed to be in the future. And the fight over high ground happening along class lines also makes sense as an interesting global warming-related conflict. I’m sure that not everyone, or even most of the folks reading Orchid will care that the book starts with something that patently silly. But it’s a distracting invention. The real consequences of climate change are terrifying enough. I wish they’d saved the wild inventions for changes in human society.
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