Excerpt from the foreword by Warren Ellis:
900-odd years from now, Earth is just a power station for Mars. Something that occurred to Ganzeer after recalling a teenage trip to the Aswan Dam and seeing a giant, impossible machine that he later learned was an environmental disaster. A machine to generate and transmit power. A machine whose construction displaced 100,000 people and caused significant ecological and health issues. We follow two young people subsisting in the glare of the Grid. The future’s killing everybody on Earth. This is the oldest and purest form of science fiction: taking a new angle on the present condition to light it in different and awful ways. Even absurdity brings clarity.
And this book does have absurdity. Stylistic shifts pile up, jokes clatter about, it gets goofy and funny. But don’t be fooled. Ganzeer is fucking furious. The book is jagged with it. THE SOLAR GRID is big and full, it pushes boundaries and it absolutely crackles with the anger of an artist who’s been watching his world go stupid and cruel and mad for far too long. So he gives us a book that amplifies that stupidity and cruelty and madness but never lets us lose sight of where it all emanates from and where it lays today.
THE SOLAR GRID is an immense undertaking that combines so many different styles into a coherent whole that I think it alters the conception of what a big graphic novel can be, and rich enough to be one of the few graphic novels that deserves the term “novel.”
An old acquaintance from the science fiction literature field actually cut ties with me over this. Fuck him.
The foreword can be read in full within the pages of THE SOLAR GRID hardback, now available for pre-order.
