Descender, Volume 3: Singularities: 06/30/20

Descender, Volume 3: Singularities by Jeff Lemire and Dustin Nguyen takes a step back from the current events to look at how all the characters came to be where they are.

While we've gotten Tim-21's history before, now we also get Tim-22's. Where 21 received love and a spot in the family as a second child, albeit a robotic one, 22 was purchased to be a caregiver to an angry, abusive elderly man. While 22's salvation is also from isolation, his stems from being ordered for months at a time to stay in the closet.

Besides the Tims, there is the back story for Telsa, the doctor, and the driller robot. These are robots who can and do break their programming. There are no laws of robotics at play here, meaning any robot can be dangerous.

As with the previous two volumes, Singularities sits on the road narrative spectrum. While there are multiple stories, multiple points of view, each of the stories can be summed up by this is the point where each one became an orphan. If they are orphans, they are orphan travelers (FF).

The destination for everyone is utopia (FF). The invasion, the destruction of vast civilizations across multiple planets results in an unknowable landscape. Together they have ended up on a planet that should not exist, but does.

The route they take is offroad. It's through space, it's through caves, and so forth. (66)

All together, volume three is the story of orphan travelers forced to go to utopia via offroad routes (FFFF66).

Volume four is Orbital Mechanics (2017).

Five stars

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