Manuele Fior is one of those for me: I've enjoyed all of his books since, but nothing has hit me like 5,000 km per second. He's a somewhat cerebral and assured maker of comics, working in soft tones (in this case, of blacks and greys, but more recently in color), who often uses SFnal themes in his work in a matter-of-fact, sophisticated way. I'd still send new readers to 5k kmps, but science fiction readers in particular will find a lot of interest in books like Celestia and Blackbird Days.
And also this one: The Interview, originally published in 2013 and translated by Jamie Richards for this 2017 American edition.
Like many of Fior's works, it's SFnal, set in 2048. Somewhere in Italy, Raniero is a fiftyish psychologist - he works from a hospital in the city, but lives in a suburban home, out in a zone not entirely safe since the unspecified Uprisings not too long ago. We think the Uprisings were pretty major - there are hints that Italy, or all of Europe, is now Balkanized - but Fior doesn't explain when or how or what it was. There was a major political/social disjunction, maybe a few years back, and it is still reverberating.
One of the reverberations is The New Convention, a movement among the younger generation. There is a manifesto laying out the principles, and we hear a bit about that - it sounds strident and demanding and visionary, all in ways that seem deeply unrealistic to those not committed to it, in the ways of all manifestos. The main tenets, or the ones that outsiders focus on, are the rejection of monogamy - the book description calls it "free love and alternative models to coupling and family." So not quite '60s communalism come again, but something very close - New Conventioneers seem to live in groups as well.
New Convention seems to be a positive, loving thing - all of those twenty-somethings fucking each other in whatever permutations they want, whenever they want - but there is also random violence in this world, with gangs of house-breakers roaming the now-dangerous suburbs, and it's not clear if they are connected to New Convention by anything but their shared youth.
One evening, Rainero is driving home, talking on his phone with a colleague. He sees something mysterious in the sky, glowing inverted pyramids or triangles. He crashes his car, runs out to see the apparition. He doesn't tell his wife Nadia about the vision, or his friend Franco who comes out to their house that night to tow the car away for repair.
But the next day, he has a new patient: a young woman, Dora, one of the New Convention. She's been institutionalized by her parents, because she claims to be telepathic, to be in communication with aliens. She says she sees them, glowing pyramids in the sky - most recently the night before.
Meanwhile, Raniero's wife Nadia is separating from him. We don't know exactly why, but we think Raniero has been distant, and maybe too much living in the past - the suburban house, the gas-powered old-fashioned car. She's picking out a new apartment in the city, and he goes with her to look at it. They're separating, but it's a polite, quiet, civilized separation - maybe because it's not inevitable, maybe because she hopes he can change, maybe because a dozen maybes. But she's moving out.
Before she goes, though, their suburban home is attacked by masked criminals one night - they are tied up, roughed up, Nadia threatened with rape, jewelry and valuables stolen. The thugs seem to have been sent specifically by someone - they say to each other that they were told not to hurt the couple too much.
Through these days, Raniero works with Dora, talks with her - about her "delusions," about the Convention. She's said to be very beautiful, though the way Fior draws her - that's her on the cover, big nose and all - does not strike me as notably attractive. Raniero is sexually attracted to her, of course - and, as part of the Convention, we suppose she's interested on some level. (The promiscuous must always want to have sex with us, right? Since we are clearly wonderful and special, since we are us.)
Events escalate. Raniero meets other members of Dora's communal living group, learns more about the Convention and what Dora thinks the aliens want her to do. And the pyramids come back, in a major way, in larger numbers, so that no one can deny they exist.
But The Interview, the bulk of it, is not the story of the world or the aliens - it's Raniero's story, of how meeting Dora, working with her, seeing the glowing pyramids, changed him, diverted his life. So the main story ends with him, with the decisions he made.
Well, I say his decisions - Fior might not agree. There's a coda at the end, that provides the title: it's a hundred years later, and Dora is being interviewed as a beloved, respected, world-famous leader. Her telepathy is now ubiquitous, and it's implied that human relationships are vastly different, now that everyone can read minds - this seems to be more of a "flash of insight" telepathy than a "I can see all your thoughts in real time" telepathy, but I don't put too much weight on that distinction. Over time insights build on each other.
The world seems civilized and stable; we hope it's better than our own, or the world we saw in 2048. The people in it think the aliens didn't mean to do anything - if they even were intelligent aliens, not just some bizarre natural phenomenon - but the glowing pyramids, whatever they were, just passed through our space, and caused changes in their wake.
The Interview is a book full of ideas and thoughts: like a lot of Fior, it will not explain or declaim those ideas. They're in the weave, to be plucked out and examined, intrinsically part of the story. This one might not have grabbed me quite as deeply as 5k kmps, but it's a deep, thoughtful, capacious SF story with a depth of nuance and gesture rare in comics.
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