Book-A-Day 2018 #101: Aama, Vol. 3: The Desert of Mirrors by Frederik Peeters

I don't know if it's the Moebius influence, or something inherent to French SF comics, but Aama is hurtling headlong towards those old questions of transcendence and identity, with a gigantic unknowable biological system (partly or entirely built by people, but now out of their control) providing both instant death in thrillingly unique and horrible ways and also transformative mental experiences that one expects will culminate into someone becoming The Incal or some such thing.

(I may be being a tad reductive here. Please adjust your assumptions accordingly.)

That's where we are with Aama, Vol. 3: The Desert of Mirrors, hitting the three-quarters mark of this soft SF planetary opera by Frederik Peeters. (See my review of the second volume, The Invisible Throng; I covered the first one in a very short way during one of my review bankruptcies.)

This is book three of a four-book series -- if you're confused by my first three paragraphs, it's only to be expected. Aama is soft SF as well, full of unlikely biology and lots of things that probably violate at least one of the laws of thermodynamics. So any explanations will be believable in as much as you're satisfied with a certain lack of rigor in the flying-slipstick category and with the nature of the Big Questions underlying Peeters' story.

This time out, we get the aftermath of the horrific ending of Invisible Throng, and finally circle back to the beginning of the first book, The Smell of Warm Dust, surprising those of us (well, me, at least) who had forgotten entirely that the main story was a very extended flashback. We also learn more about the Muy-Tang Corporation, which set up this experiment -- and, if you know anything about corporations in science fiction stories, you won't be expecting them to turn out to be honest and true and to have the best interests of humanity in mind. (I am also struck, yet again, at how French comics will casually kill off what seem to be central characters and not look back. That's unusual for comics, where every character is assumed to be an IP that everyone hopes will be a movie one day.)

Peeters has to wrap this all up in one more book, which seems entirely possible -- the end of this book is hurtling towards a conclusion, so the question is whether there's as much as ninety pages of comics left to tell that ending. I may not entirely buy the science here, but it's a good story, and Peeters is handling the transcendence/connection stuff better than a number of other comics-makers I've seen (Moebius and/or Jodorowski, for example) -- and by "better," I mean "in a way that doesn't make me complain out loud."


So: Aama is still neat and quirky and full of sudden violence and sudden insight and revealing character moments. Given that the series won the Best Series award at the Angouleme festival in 2015, I suspect Peeters kept that up for the final book...which I now have to find.