Page 45 Review by Stephen
SIGNED and SKETCHED-IN - with a dustjacket composition cunningly mirrored by that of the rich red hardcover hidden underneath - HARSH PROSPECT is a substantial slice of tragic sci-fi self-published by Will Tempest, creator of the black and white short story collection SHORT SWORD.
Tempest's storytelling is impressively unhurried. Whereas others rush into spectacle, Tempest takes his time first, relishing the smooth and evocative transitions of sequential-art storytelling. He has a particular penchant for organic sinews and glutinous threads which leak, spread and stretch across his pages like monumental mycelia.
And that's a particularly apposite allusion here.
A speculative Nu-Earth colony is on its last legs. It's proving as unprofitable as it is inhospital.
The soil - such as it is on this bleak, freezing rocky Tundra - lies barren. So much so that the human colony is struggling to terraform it at all: the seedlings artificially grown from its ark supplies won't take at all. The colony is in danger either of starvation, mutiny or calling it quits.
At which point a geologist, August, surveying solo, discovers a tiny, blood-red, viscous deposit. He takes a sample, but even though he makes it successfully back to base and to his lover, Kate, the sample never makes it to an analysis lab.
And now diverse factions within the colony are about to make their own covert moves, and the art, so far simmering, will explode accordingly into gloriously grotesque, lost-opportunities action.
