Cover Design: Craig Nash
On The Compulsive Reader website, Magdalena Ball has recently written a review of An Android Awakes by Mike French and Karl Brown. She starts by identifying the influences and references that this “futuristic dystopia” conjures up for her – which she says include Bladerunner, Metropolis, The Matrix, as well as 1984, H2G2, A Clockwork Orange and Perdido Street Station. This is, she says, “science taken to its extreme, and it’s both terrifying and oddly evocative. It is, at times, also quite funny.”
She compliments Karl’s artwork which “add strong visual appeal” and are “sufficiently horrible, in a visually beautiful way, to increase the cognitive dissonance of the book”. Mike’s “rather clever meta-fictional plotline” provides “an interesting protagonist” in the “Scheherazade-like Android Writer P121928” who is struggling to be published rather than deactivated. Magdalena says the Android’s stories are “cleverly interwoven” in a way that is “both satisfying to the reader and oddly conspiratorial”. She then lists some of the “delights” of these stories with their “sheer inventiveness” and adds that there are “so many delightful connections between these stories and they’re so rich and complex that I feel the book could be re-read several times”.
She says the book is “smart, at times hysterically funny, and actually quite evocative in its science” and concludes by saying it is “an entertaining, sexy, terrifying, and beautiful novel, full of bleakness and fun” and readers will enjoy “the rich and powerful language, the complex plot lines, and the wacky and inventive landscape that both French and Brown have created in this superb graphical novel”.
You can read Magdalena’s full review on The Compulsive Reader here.