(courtesy Simon & Schuster)
Great big expansive sci-fi stories are always a huge delight to lose yourself in.
While the really good ones ask some fairly intense questions about who we are and why we do what do (and why maybe we should rethink that because reasons), they also have a wonderfully escapist element to them, a narrative spoonful of sugar approach that makes some very hard lessons go down a little more smoothly.
If you want a superlative textbook example of how good stories like this can be, then look no further than Good Luck by Matthew Erman aand Stefano Simeone which takes a breathtakingly imaginative premise and runs hard with it into fantastical places that still have a clangingly resonant humanity to them.
In this tale of an alternative Earth where luck has been made manifest, in the same way as gravity, mass and light, “Luck that you could see and feel and breathe …” – and yes, “Luck” now sports a capital L to donate its new reality and substance, by the arrival of the God Beings of Luck aka the Constellations, otherworldly deities of a kind that arrive on the planet, or perhaps they were already here given their prominence in many belief systems, and upset the natural order of things to the point where Luck has a material affect on every aspect of existence.
If you don’t have it, you are incredibly badly off like the so-called Unfortunates, three kids – Artemis Barlow, Cherry Madonna and Hilde Hilde – who since the age of nine, when they were plucked out of their broken circumstances to be trained for a mission that could well determine the fate of the human race by breaking the hold Luck has on the planet, have proved that having no Luck can be somewhat of a blessing in disguise.
Not that they see it that way since all they know are lives blighted by bad luck and suffering, but the way the scientists from The Department of Luck and Probability see them, they are the key to everything, and with their helmets full of golden good Luck – it acts much like oxygen would in poor environments – they are sent on simulation after simulation until they ready to enter Ground Zero for the Luck incursion the Kismet Core in Ohio where life as we know it has effectively ended.
(courtesy BOOM! Studios)
Of course the odds, as the back cover blurb notes are not exactly in their favour and when push comes to shove and they have to leave the simulations and tackle the real world where one false step could mean their end, and that of humanity’s, it becomes clear that rescuing Earth from the chaos of Luck and re-establishing order is going to take some real out of the box thinking and an on-the-spot defiance of all the bad luck thinking they’ve been raised and trained with.
With gorgeously rich and evocatively colourful artwork that is a joy to take in, all vibrancy and emotional intensity rolled into one visually enticing package, Good Luck is that rich and rare story that takes an outrageously audacious premise and realises in ways so stunningly good that you will likely yelp with excitement at how good the damn thing is.
The characters are wonderfully alive, the story never once loses a beat and the symmetry between writing and art never once loses cohesion, meaning that you are never taken out of the wondrously good world Erman and Simeone has conjured up from imaginations that clearly have done double and triple duty from the word go.
They also manage to seamlessly weave in messaging about self-worth and self-belief and how who you are a person at one stage doesn’t mean you are condemned to be that person for all time.
There are points in the story where impulsively eager and somewhat slapdash Artemis has to step up and step up he does, and it’s in these scenes, where the outcome pivots on some finely-balanced decision-making, that Good Luck really shines, sending out a message that one version of you does not define any and all subsequent iterations.
Buoyantly alive with grim reality and buoyant possibility, and artwork that is as vivaciously out there as the story, Good Luck is a blissfully good point of sci-fi storytelling that has tremendous heart and soul, wit and humour, stark existential musing and some damn good twists and turns, proof that done right, sci-fi has the ability to both entertain and instruct and leave us feeling all the better for it in its wake.
(courtesy BOOM! Studios)