Mathieu Bablet builds intricate, believable worlds and then plops you into the middle of them without a map. Silent Jenny, his latest feat of confident dystopian worldbuilding, is finally getting a U.S. edition via Magnetic Press and Oni Press, via a Kickstarter campaign.
The setup: a near-future world ravaged by climate collapse: insects have vanished, pollination no longer happens, and large swaths of the planet have become infertile. In response, humans have organized themselves into giant, lumbering mobile city-states called "monads," each with its own unique culture and means of survival.
At the book's heart is Jenny, a solitary researcher trying to recover bee DNA in hopes of rebooting the pollination cycle and everything that relies upon it. The story invokes familiar tales of hope, but also deals in a harsh truth: what do you do when you know the old world is gone? What do you built from its ashes?
What stands out in the preview pages is the density of Bablet's world. The monads are less city-sized vehicles than accreted layers of adaptation and survival, all pipes, platforms, and stitched-together systems. Inside the story, things phase back and forth between that macro scale of the monads and tight, almost claustrophobic sequences. With little dialog, the storytelling relies heavily on movement, environmental texture, and the physical strain of just getting from place to place in a ruined world.
"Silent Jenny asks, 'What remains of our humanity when our tools are gone?' Through a blend of desert punk aesthetics and dystopic nightmare, the story is about environmental reclamation and the search for meaning in a world that has moved on from us," says Magnetic Press' Director of Publishing, Mike Kennedy.
Bablet has been called "a master of scale," someone who can capture "the crushing weight of dystopia while finding the microscopic beauty in its cracks." These pages make a compelling case for that.
If you've followed Bablet's earlier work, Silent Jenny is the final installment of his loose sci-fi trilogy that includes Shangri-La and Carbon & Silicon. The Kickstarter includes a deluxe hardcover and some swanky extras, including a small art book exploring the world further.
Here are a few pages of Silent Jenny to whet your whistle.
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