From School Library Journal
Grade 9 Up Ellis tells the story of an imminent encounter with a grim past. One hundred years in the future, UN Weapons Inspector Nathan Kane is sent on a top-secret mission to a space station orbiting Europa. The scientific crew working there has discovered ancient caskets floating in the massive, ice-covered ocean of that moon. Inside the coffins are members of a violent and ancient race of beings the ancestors of humankind who have been floating in stasis for millions of years, waiting to be discovered. But to what purpose? And what of the huge slumbering mechanical device pointed at Earth? And why is the interplanetary technology corporation DOORS so interested? With cinematic illustrations, Ellis's story rises above cookie-cutter sci-fi devices and touches on modern issues from racism to weapons of mass destruction. This book is everything a graphic novel should be tightly plotted with memorable characters, vibrantly illustrated, and a smart story that contains all the best elements of both speculative fiction and social commentary. For readers who have had enough of moody superheroes, tiny manga warriors with huge swords, and whining post-modern autobiographies,
Ocean will be a perfect and satisfying read.
Steev Baker, Kewaskum Public Library, WI Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Sometime in the future, the UN sends weapons inspector Nathan Kane to a space station above Jupiter, where an exploratory team has made an alarming and ominous discovery: beneath the icy exterior of the planet's ocean moon, Europa, are coffins containing members of a sleeping alien race and guns capable of destroying an entire planet. As Kane and the station crew investigate, they are threatened by the sinister representative of a powerful software conglomerate seeking to exploit the discovery for its own purposes. Writer Ellis is at his best with character-based sf in which an iconoclastic protagonist is injected into an intriguing, futuristic premise, as in the cult favorite
Transmetropolitan.
Ocean lacks
Transmet's verve and attitude, even though Kane is a resourceful badass like
Transmet's Spider Jerusalem (classier, however; think Samuel L. Jackson for the movie), but is still a solid, provocative yarn that, emphasizing concept and character rather than action and heroics, and greatly aided by Chris Sprouse's lucid art, comes off rather like an ambitious, big-budget sf film.
Gordon FlaggCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
