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Brown, Box – An Entity Observes All Things
Who’s up for a good old fashioned science fiction anthology? If that’s not then you’d better move along, although I can’t imagine why you’d rule this out because of that. For one thing it’s Box Brown, who has a hell of a track record with the quality of his comics. Also “science fiction” basically means “any sort of fiction that also has science, real or imagined, in it.” That covers a lot of ground, even though it’s a definition I just made up. Anyway, this is a collection of a bundle of different stories from Box, covering a wide range of topics. The highlight is probably the cover story, because it so nearly wraps itself up by the end, but I can’t dig much more into it without spoiling it. Other subjects include a mysterious pizza tattoo, what happens when you forget your entertainment while piloting a mating giant robot, reliving a painful moment of your life through science, the essence of god on a waffle, being disconnected while taking comfort from the familiar, taking the long view on the effects of social media interactions, a good old fashioned quest, and getting yourself remade after your ego is destroyed. Not a single one of these stories is as simple as I made it appear through that synopsis, so I’ll just retreat to my fallback position of wanting to spoil as little as possible from this comic. Every single story made me either rethink an aspect of my perception of reality of feel all or some of the feelings, sometimes both at the same time. That seems like the best possible recommendation for reading a book, so why not do so? If you’re already familiar with Box’s work then you shouldn’t take much convincing. If you’re not, that’s a situation you need to rectify, and an anthology like this is the perfect place to do it. $12
