(courtesy BOOM! Studios)
A prevailing theme in many sci-fi stories is how, even in the future where things are supposed to get better, the rich seem to be richer and still in power while the poor continue to be treated like annoying but necessary resources who think far too much for their own good and whose only role, if they are allowed to have one at all, is feather the nest of their wealthier benefactors aka tyrannical overloads.
Sarah Gailey takes this very current theme and runs with it in Know Your Station, which possesses a deliciously fun play-on-words title which speaks to the graphic novel’s hard sci-fi premise of a future where the very wealthiest and hideously entitled of people have fled to the stars on board a luxuriously tended spaceship, run by Avulsion Technologies, leaving the bulk of Earth’s population to face oblivion courtesy of climate change.
Quite how little the 1% care for those they have left behind, and for the employees onboard the ship who are treated, in true darkly-twisted neoliberalist style as resource fodder and nothing more, is graphically illustrated, quite literally in fact, in Know Your Station‘s opening pages which all of the motherhood statements that adorn Avulson’s on-Earth recruitment for the spaceship are belied by the copy which constantly celebrates in hilariously non-ironic ways how good the pervasive corporatisation of every part of society is.
Learning is now corporatised as is medical care and every aspect of cradle-to-the-grave life, and while the 1% celebrate this as some sort of great step forward, those who serve them are left out an existence as best they can in a world where they are treated as less than human and not deserving of any of the care or privilege that the rich routinely claim as their birthright.
It’s dark and nasty world and while most people seem to take it in their stride because what choice do they have, someone is murdering the billionaires one-by-one and in gruesomely artistic and horrifyingly poetic ways that suggest revenge killings but without any of the raging passion that should accompany them.
The person left to solve the crime is is Elise, a non-policeperson who is the spaceship’s only living answer to law enforcement and who, and doesn’t this timing suck, is battling to get clean from a pervasive recreational drug known as “Blue” which comes, oh happy day, with weirdass hallucinations and time black outs which is not all that helpful when bizarrely gruesome murders are happening everywhere.
Elise needs her wits about her and while she has the help of her secretly sentient AI companion and a fellow employee who might like as more than just a colleague, she’s absolutely up against in a space-set whodunnit with lots and lots of bodies but no real clues or leads and a sense that the world, unjust as it is, is spiralling well and truly out of control.
Possessed of a wicked sense of humour and a knowing sense of just how unequal the world, now and in the future, is, Know Your Station is a brilliant piece of sci-fi storytelling.
Bolstered by a premise that Gailey absolutely delivers on and then some, and given real vivacity and life (yes, word use very much intended and we do appreciate the irony) by Kangas’s gorgeously evocative artwork and Rebecca’s Nalty’s tone-perfect colouring, Know Your Station not only serves up the mother of all mysteries but does it such a way that it also doubles as an excoriating takedown of a world fashioned by the rich that has left humanity, both the bulk of the population and the idea of what it means to be human, far, far behind.
The clever thing about the writing in particular is that for a graphic novel that is incredibly heavy on the messaging, Know Your Station never even comes close to feel weighted down by its own ideas or overly preachy.
In fact, it essentially lets the actions of the rich, which may or may not have led to their demise, damn by their own hand, and so artfully clever is the writing that in amongst all of the horror and the humour, some very serious points are being made.
The entirety of the storyline does not skip a beat, and there is nary a false step in the narrative which neatly balances some big audacious plot points, mostly courteous of the murders which are brutally intense but somehow quite artistically impressive too, with some lovely intimate moments and glaringly intense meditations on the state of her life by Elise.
It’s Elise, really, that adds so much richly human energy to proceedings because she’s fallible and she knows it, and while in many other stories she’d suddenly find it in herself to become the star investigator she always suspected she was, her journey is a far rougher and bumpier one, which does lead to a successful place but one reached in a very flawed and relatably human way.
That’s part of the appeal of Know Your Station – it’s clever and imaginative and gleefully well realised with an ending you don’t see coming and which is nothing short of wondrously good, but it’s all anchored by someone who has to really work to make a success of things with her greatest enemy, soulless rich people aside, often herself.
Rich in artwork and story that makes it pop like the most blockbustery of blockbusters, and alive with thoughtful rumination, and sly, damning humour, Know Your Station is a triumph, a graphic novel that uses its artform to devastatingly engrossing effect, delivering a thrillingly thoughtful whodunnit which is funny, horrifying and which delivers a scathing societal critique while keeping its eyes very much on the humanity of what is, by any estimation, a very inhuman situation.
(courtesy BOOM! Studios)