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The article is horrible, and STEALTH TRIBES looks shithouse, from the dull, faux-edgy title on down.
Ellis's work has been largely free of straight narrative captions--i.e., internal monologue--unless the story was specifically constructed around the voice, as in Transmet (how do you tell the story of a writer, if not by the words he's written?), he's preferred to let the medium's inherent cinematic qualities do the storytelling for him. This thing, though, looks to have the lugubrious blathering of a Delano Hellblazer--and that's not a compliment.
What we see here is sub-Blade Runner hackwork, peppered with cod-futuristic bogosity that's meant to sound throwaway but in fact desperately calls attention to itself (Dude! They're smoking music!! What a Mad, Beautiful Idea™! And he just drops these things in there for atmosphere, man!)--bibs and bobs from New Scientist and BoingBoing (this is his Cory Doctorow book, I'm thinking) patched together in a tapestry of blah.
That page is all Telling, not Showing--theres's no motion, just attitude posing as atmosphere.
Orbiter was meh, and I place the blame squarely on Ellis's writing. The characters were mouthpieces and pawns, going through their paces, doing things for no reason other than to blatantly advance the plot, making speeches to rehash Scientific American articles point-by-point, and generally failing to come alive as people. It wanted to link a general societal decay to the death of the space-travel dream, but failed to do so convincingly (although Doran's vistas of the shantytown around KSC had some promise in that direction).
This looks to have a little more scope than Orbiter, confined itself almost entirely to investigation procedures at a single location--a criminal underuse of Doran's considerable talents; after that amazing opening, there was precious little for her to draw--but Stealth Tribes looks like a continuation of Ellis's holding pattern; a minor work to fill the gap until he stumbles into another major project. If he ever does. |
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