I came into this book with almost no expectations, and was happily surprised – it’s a taut, smartly-paced crime thriller in a lived-in SF universe. I’ll try not to spoil what turns into a twisty plot with a lot of revelations, but keep that in mind.
is Jared Throne’s second full-length graphic novel, and I think the first to be published by an established company – Top Shelf put it out in October. It’s the kind of book that takes unabashedly genre materials, uses them well, and mixes them to make its own story.
It’s the medium future. Humanity has expanded to some unknown number of other planets, and seems to be living under a mildly dystopian corporatocracy – well, about as dystopian and corporate-ruled as today, frankly. One of those corporations, Partna, has a string of “Bridge Planets” – uninhabited worlds used as refueling stations for automated transport ships. It sounds like the point is either to extract all of the mineral wealth from those planets or to degrade them enough that Partna can take full ownership for some other activity later – or maybe both.
Four people are planning a heist on one of those planets. Garrett was a VP at Partna before a scandal – which he claims he had nothing to do with – took him down, tossed him in prison, and ruined his life. He has the knowledge and the desire to hurt Partna. The other three are specialists: Hudson is a long-time criminal with a lot of expertise; Wes is the one who’ll get them through digital security, with his reprogrammed drone Etta; and Pearl, Wes’s sister, is the pilot. They have contacts so they can “borrow” a ship to get there and back – not in a lot of comfort, but good enough.
Garrett knows of a high-value ship, with extra security, coming into Bridge Planet Nine soon. The ship, and the planet, are completely automated – no staff at all. So the four heisters just have to get there, quietly take what they want, and get back out – a big payout for all four of them, minimal risk.
Of course it’s not that simple.
Before we meet the heisters, there’s what I might call a cold open. A group of people, on a planet somewhere, execute or sacrifice one member of their group by chaining him outside at night and removing the mask they all wear. Something in the environment kills him, unpleasantly, almost immediately. We don’t know exactly where they are. But we can guess.
Garrett and crew do get to Bridge Planet Nine without trouble, and park their ship away from the transfer station they plan to hit. They take a ground truck over, marvel at the ruined buildings from when this was an inhabited planet, and get to work on the security at the transfer station. They know their jobs, are smart and organized, and have planned carefully. (This is roughly a third of the way into the book.)
Things go badly in unexpected ways, as they always will in a heist thriller. The mission shifts, there are revelations of what Partna did and is doing on Bridge Planet Nine, and, of course, there is sudden violence and death. There are other characters, too, of course. You need to have a larger cast than just four people to have enough deaths to make a thriller.
The borrowed ship does lift off from the planet at the end of the story; I’ll say that much. It does return to Earth, with a crew and a pilot. The people on that ship are not unrewarded by their efforts on Bridge Planet Nine. It’s a good ending, a satisfying ending – one that fits for both a heist thriller and a gritty anti-corporate SF story.
Throne draws this in an indy-friendly style, with sharp spotted blacks, crisply distinct faces, and a good eye for design – both of his pages and for elements in his world. Suitably for both the heist and grungy-SF genres, most of the background elements look worn, lived-in, half-broken – he draws a universe that’s already seen a lot of activity, where the street has been making its own uses for things for a long time now. Bridge Planet Nine is impressive: it tells its cross-genre story well, with distinctive characters, a strong sense of place, and serious tension throughout.
