The theme anthology is an idea that doesn’t really need to be explained to most readers of science fiction, fantasy, and horror – one that’s common in the history of the genres and still popular today. Whether it’s the cheap paperback I bought in our local mall’s dying department store in the ’80s that dared to ask, “What if plants, but evil?” to the much more promising sword & sorcery & romance collection that I just supported on Backerkit, a book that collects a series of short stories (whether new, reprints, or a combination) that all deal with a common theme or subject, it’s something that we all understand.
The theme anthology is also common in comics, and it’s something that publisher Iron Circus Comics excels at. Iron Circus has a track record – along with publishing lots of other fantastic work – of successful theme anthologies, on a whole range of subjects. But with their latest publication, Failure To Launch, Iron Circus has done something that might be a bit less familiar to SFFH readers, though perhaps not surprising to comics readers – a (mostly) non-fiction theme anthology.
Failure To Launch: A Tour of Ill-fated Futures
Published by Iron Circus Comics
Lead Editor – Kel McDonald
Cover Artist – Roderick Constance
Proofreaders: Abby Lehrke & Matt Sheridan
Publisher l Editor-in-Chief: C. Spike Trotman
Art Director: Matt Sheridan
Print Technician l Additional Design: Hye Mardikian
Contributors: E(mily) Altman, Harry Brewis, Dani Coleman, Roderick Constance, Kelci D. Crawford, Aarón Cruz, Evan Dahm, Lauren Davis, Blue Delliquanti, Ryan Estrada, Colton Fox, Matthew R. Francis, Helen Greetham, Maddi Gonzalez, Tuisku H., Ashley Hasfal, Fend Hamilton, Mel Hilario, Iris Jay, JD, Erin Keepers, Violet Kitchen, Katie Longua, C. S. Garcia Martinez, Einar Valur Másson, Barbara Mazzi, Maki Naro, Ryan North, Colin O’Mahoney, Rowan Oats, Bolu Oriowo, Cat Parra, Sam Roberts, Mari Rolin, Erin Roseberry, Shannon Saar, Victor Santiago, Skutch, Katie Tiedrich, André Valente, Lore Vicente, Nakata “Knack” Whittle, Alice Woods.
Whew! That’s a heck of a list of contributors, and it reflects the extent and breadth of Failure To Launch. This is a big book, at 340 pages. That gives lots of space for the contributors to dive into the theme in a more than cursory way; the 31 pieces range in length from a typical 4 to 8 pages, to as many as 20 pages. That allows for real range, in the number of creators involved, their subject matter, and their art styles, and it’s a major strength of the book.
Promotional copy describes Failure To Launch as a contrast to recent historical graphic novels that “celebrat[e] the high water marks of human achievement” by providing “…a treasure trove of inspiring and illuminating accounts of moments when humanity was this close to making something special but totally biffed it.”
The excellent first piece in the collection really delivers on that promise. ‘The Paradise Within Reach of All Men’ (written by Ryan North with art by Kel McDonald) looks at the man behind a failed Nineteenth-Century utopian colony in Venezuela, his intoxicating but unattainable dreams of automation freeing humanity from the need for labor, and how believing in him got people killed.
But the book as a whole doesn’t hew quite as closely to the theme as the write-up perhaps implies. While Failure To Launch does include a number of examples of promising inventions that didn’t make it, and big dreamers whose reach exceeded their grasp, there are also many unattained futures that are less technologically focused or that approach the theme more indirectly. There are a number of examinations of con artists, of failed end-of-the-world prophecies, and Y2K comes up twice – once as another example of an unfulfilled prophecy about the end, and once in a slightly confusingly-presented fictional look at a world where we didn’t do anything to stop Y2K and the end really does come as a result.
This isn’t a weakness; some of those less-obviously on-theme contributions were among my favorites! But it illustrates the difficulty in effectively describing and promoting a work with a broad theme that lends itself to many different interpretations and directions.
So, Failure To Launch is a buffet of human hubris, paths not taken, and missed opportunities. Like any buffet, it offers a wide range of options – and accordingly, not everything will be to every reader’s taste. Because of that, to avoid criticizing well-made works that simply didn’t land for me but probably will for many others, I’m going to focus on the pieces that stood out for me as excellent and as reflecting the promise of the anthology.
‘When Do We Get Our Star Trek Future’, by J. Dalton, is a pointed look at how Star Trek never really explains how we get to the post-scarcity utopia it presents, and how it pays lip service to humanity growing beyond capitalism while relying on technological solutions to social problems – an inherently capitalistic philosophy of us innovating our way out the problems our innovation has created. Dalton briefly imagines a Star Trek that truly embraces its own radical implications, with the crew of the Enterprise electing their department heads, and the crew voting on whether to fire at an enemy ship, or withdraw. It’s a sharp, loving critique, and really illustrates the strengths of taking a broader approach to the book’s theme.
‘Death of a PC Repair Shop’ by E. Altman is an autobiographical (implicitly, at least; it could also be very well-done first-person fiction) reminiscence of an era of home computers that allowed people to fix their own devices, or get well-informed local small businesspeople to do so, contrasts it with the current parlous state of planned obsolescence and proprietary repairs, and looks ahead with hope to the potential for Right To Repair laws empowering people to be able to truly maintain their computers again. It’s the most personal piece in the book, and manages to be a finely-observed look back at a time and place that’s gone and a well-researched call to action.
‘The First Union’, written by Harry Brewis (you might know him better from the internet as Hbomberguy) with art by Skutch, is a smart, angry, very funny, and occasionally profane look at the truth behind the Luddites – the actual, historical, loom-smashing Luddites, not the pointlessly technology-averse reactionaries the name has come to mean – the conditions that led to their rise, the oppression that led to their fall, and the workers’ power they represent and that never stays defeated for long. It was a bold move to close the anthology with a piece whose rallying cry is “we should shoot more oligarchs in their dicks”, and I can only applaud it.
It’s interesting that, except for ‘The Paradise Within Reach of All Men’, all my favorite contributions are the ones that suggest that it’s the world we ended up in that’s the ill-fated future, that the real failures to launch aren’t the forgotten inventions by big-dreaming crackpots or the unreached dreams of ahead-of-their-time visionaires, but the lost, real chances along the way to build a better world than the one we’ve got. That humanity, indeed, “totally biffed it” – but that we remain capable of so much more, and better.
Failure To Launch, in its theme, structure, and overall approach – the promotional material uses the phrase “bite-sized ‘pop-history’ vignettes” – reminds me a lot of the Big Book Of series published by Paradox Press (an imprint of DC Comics), between 1994 and 2000. These were a series of large-format (befitting the name) comics collections, with each volume generally by a single author but with a variety of artists, exploring a single topic, sometimes narrow and sometimes broad. The presentation of the material was as non-fiction, even when dealing with dubiously factual subjects – like the Big Book of Urban Legends, or my personal favorite in those years of conspiracy chic, the Big Book of Conspiracies. It was a great series, every book smart, fun, snarky but engaging and informative.
Failure To Launch is a worthy heir to that tradition, and build on it by asking sharper questions, looking back with a keener eye, and forward with hope. I recommend it and I hope we see more books like it, soon.
Failure To Launch: A Tour of Ill-fated Futures will be released on July 9, 2024. The publisher provided an electronic ARC of this book for my review.
