Science Fiction
by Joe Ollmann
Montreal, QC: Conundrum Press, 2014
128 pp, $18
Edge Effects
by Jan Conn
Vancouver, BC: Brick, 2012
96 pp, $19
Joe Ollmann’s new graphic novel is titled Science Fiction, but it is about the tension between “faith” and “fact”: Faith accepts as fact what scientists consider incredible.
Ollmann’s implicit argument is that all religious belief is a form of science fiction, but his deliberately unresolved narrative also suggests that such belief can still be “true,” though impossible to communicate to non-believers.
The Montreal author draws, scripts, the story of Mark Sett (“Go” should be added), a mildly depressed, middle-aged, non-fiction-reading, science teacher, who likes his job, but finds his teen pupils difficult to reach, but who enjoys pleasant domesticity with his common-law spouse, Susan Cale, head cashier at a Montreal supermarket.
Mark and Sue seem to love each other, only arguing over the usual issues—different duties, schedules, and entertainment choices.
Trouble arrives when the no-nonsense Mark comes to realize—no, violently believe and insist—that he has been the victim of an alien abduction, years before in university, and begins to press Sue to accept his belief as “true,” while also resigning his usual responsibilities so that he can share his recovered memory with Internet allies who recall similar jaunts with aliens.
As Mark slides into a slough of chat rooms, neglecting himself, his home, his job, and Sue, she becomes a nag and a scold, and then so depressed as to fall prey to her boss’s lecherous attentions.
Ollmann doesn’t illustrate Mark’s story of U.F.O. “uploading” (so to speak). The artist-writer is, instead, scrupulous in detailing the domestic drama of a household falling into dysfunction and a relationship falling into disrepair.
We see Mark become bearded, reclusive, and virulently defensive about his “belief,” while Sue becomes desperate and despairing in her efforts to convince Mark that he is delusional and requires psychiatric intervention.
This tale of “science fiction” is a soap opera. That Mark is black and Sue is white is, at first, merely evidence of Canadian multiculturalism. However, the couple’s interracial background also mirrors that of Barney and Betty Hill, who were famously—allegedly—kidnapped by spaceship-piloting aliens in September 1961 while returning to their U.S. home after a visit to Montreal.
Ollmann might have the Hill story in mind, but he focuses on the breakdown of the relationship between Mark and Sue, the distress they both feel, plus the disruption of Sue’s employ and the looming loss, for Mark, of his career.
Behind this narrative is the story of every evangelizing, religious convert: When they know what they believe is true, and abandon their former lives to pursue and proclaim their truth, family and friends alike become alienated. Perhaps every “true belief,” held with conviction, represents an “alien” abduction….
Ollmann’s previous graphic text, This Will All End in Tears, won the Doug Wright Award for Best Book. He is a savvy artist who drafts a compelling story. Also impressive is that his publisher is Conundrum Press of Greenwich, Nova Scotia.
Jan Conn is a native Québécoise, an entomologist, and a poet, always interested in linking science, travel, art, history, and self. These concerns animate her eighth collection, Edge Effects.
A Conn poem, like a Zen kōan, relies on imaginative metaphor that induces meditation. Try these lines: “The sky clouds up, the stars are invisible. / It feels like infinity / could take up residence in me, some rough place / like my liver that won’t see daylight. / Where are the sources of the self? I need to find mine / and give them a good shaking.”
The jazzy shifts between moments of description and announcement verge on surrealism: “A solitary bee / zigzags toward a redbud on the hilltop. // My point of view? Harmless and aimless, / sexual fantasy’s ‘voluptuous’ is disappointing in the flesh….”
For all of her scientific—I mean, accurate—observation, Conn arrives, surprisingly, at mysticism, regularly: “To become more buoyant, / I eat breakfast—duckweed and water hyacinth. // Into the dead of night the errant blue of the river / carries the Milky Way and me, glimmering and wavering.” Conn is a poet for thinkers who dream. Take it on faith.
