By Simon Roy, New Reliable Press
Science fiction, at its atomic heart, is about nifty futurist ideas bootstrapped to a compelling fictional story. A good piece of science fiction pops with dozens of great concepts that are elaborated to the reader as the story progresses. Great Sci-fi immerses you in a different world where you are expected to piece together the futurisms on display through inference instead of instruction. Jan's Atomic Heart is an example of this kind of great Sci-fi. Jan's Atomic Heart is about a man, Jan, who finds himself in a temporary robotic body after his real body is destroyed in a car accident. He learns that his new robotic body is the same model used as mobile bombs by terrorists and begins to worry that he too is a bomb. Jan’s Atomic Heart is a beautifully rendered comic with a compelling story with some great futurisms and twists. The comic, for being a fairly short story, also does a huge amount of world building. Roy brilliantly works in small peripheral details and snippets of tangential dialogue - a panel here, a panel there - that manage to convey the stories environment and broader context without distracting from the main plot and characters. It's a pretty great technique for packing in setting detail without losing too much page real-estate. Jan's Atomic Heart is a brilliant Sci-fi book and well worth checking out if you can find it.
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