Galaxion

Always up for some Sciencey-type Fiction whether in book, flick or comic form, I've been flipping through Galaxion's archive recently, so as to refine my already mighty eye-rolling powers. Call me a jaded old escapist but most of its foreshadowed plot twists seemed blatantly telegraphed even for its presumed intended audience of naive adolescent comic book store layabouts.

Well duh, of course the experimental hyperdrive is going to land them in an [redacted][redacted] and of course the [redacted] is going to be an alien and the survivors will be mingling with the [redacted] of world-wide [cockadoodle] and the accident must have been sabotage by one of the [redacted]s acting under a latent form of [red][acted] and eventually somebody's gonna probe that damn cat.

Okay, fine, maybe I've seen a few too many Twilight Zones and I'm a bit too familiar with Chekov's phaser by this point in my star cruising. While not fundamentally creative, Galaxion's still adequately paced and doesn't unduly belabor its revelations, walking that successful popular entertainment line between facile and engaging. Meh, worth a skim, I guess.

What really gets me is the ship's crew, and by that I mean it gets me wanting to open up all the airlocks and vacuum out some stupid. How do you make Captain James T. Kirk look, by comparison, like a realistic portrait of a professional, hard-bitten explorer? Replace him with a spacefaring version of the cast of Saved by the Bell. Which might be fine if Galaxion sold itself as a goofier, more fanciful tale, but not if you want to involve military ranks and life-or-death situations. This well-coiffed ditz with the heart pendant wouldn't inspire confidence in a kindergarden classroom, much less in the grim, barren, icy depths of space. Suits her fine since her crew all seems to hail from Planet Sunshine in the Star System Lollipops, grinning constantly like maniacs, never backbiting or shirking duties or trying to climb the ladder over each other's corpses or acting in any other way human.

The only character I find even remotely relatable's the one token unlikeable, surly, overly-formal crewman who never talks to anyone. He fits into SF. The rest of them, I don't know what infernal, saccharine kids' puppet show they emigrated from, but it's not the cold, impersonal genre of emotionless ideas.

Surprising, the ways in which an author can surprise us. While I can predict a chapter or so ahead of Galaxion's young adult version of fictional science, I can't for the life of me figure out which cast member will be filling which role. Who will be sacrificed, who will save the day, who will berate whom? They are spawned by a mind utterly alien to my own.

Oh, that human element.