Zeb Larson reviews The Surface #2…
There’s a traitor on the team, and a cityship arriving into the morphing utopia of The Surface will change everything. Just as the team finds what they were looking for—they are threatened by forces that might tear them apart!
After The Surface’s first issue, I was prepared to write it off as overwrought and an excessive exercise in meta-narrative. However, this issue improved on some of the things that didn’t work in the first issue, namely the dialogue. (Also, no idiotic mentions of Ebola). The opacity of the story still means that it likely won’t be for everybody, but at least at the moment, it appears that The Surface is starting to come together. I won’t be discussing major spoilers in this review, so read on without concern.
The three try to make sense of what they’ve discovered. Despite their initial belief that The Surface is some sort of hyper-sophisticated illusion, they eventually decide that the place is in fact real. As the three go swimming together and then fall asleep, we learn that the narration boxes aren’t intended for the audience. Instead, it’s somebody trying to get through to Nasia, and they briefly succeed. They tell her that she won’t have to relive this again and that she’s been here multiple times. She then awakens to see that government agents have closed in on them.
I still find it somewhat vexing that we need narration telling us how confusing this is, and that even the author’s intentions are unknown to the narrators. Don’t worry, we’re sufficiently confused. However, the dialogue improved substantially in this issue, and the page does not feel cluttered like it did last time. The absence of science exposition and its dubious relationship to the human condition helped a lot, if only because there was less space on the page. This is a step toward actual character development, though we’re still not quite there. All three tend to say the same kinds of things, though the narrators only speak to Nasia.
The self-awareness of the book is going to be a turn-off for some readers. The faux interview is less prominent in this issue than it was in the last one, which is a good thing. Self-awareness of the book isn’t a bad thing unless the author is trying to tell you what to think about the book, which is less of a problem here than it was last time. However, the double narrator’s presence in the story is an interesting touch, one that will keep me reading a little bit longer.
It looks as though we’re headed for some kind of Matrix scenario, but the exact terms are still not spelled out. I’ll stick with this a little bit longer and see if it develops.
Zeb Larson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ONsp_bmDYXc&list=PL18yMRIfoszFLSgML6ddazw180SXMvMz5
Originally published April 8, 2015. Updated April 14, 2018.
