One of the things I lament the loss of in the information age is unfettered creativity in SciFi. All too much in SciFi the concepts and technologies and even supernatural abilities need to be grounded in some form of accepted science rather than veering way far away from any modern thinging and just aiming for wild speculation... hell not even speculation, just pure, outrightmafe-up bullshit. The SciFi of the 1950's and earlier were riddled with scientific inaccuarcies and implausibility (one movie postulated that the Earth could slip out of its orbit and start hurtling towards the sun and pulled a pretty meaty dramatic film out of it) but as entertainment they would work. I don't know if it was naivete or more willingness to suspend one's disbelief, but modern creators who craft stories so wild tend to be dismissed as silly or archaic.
Manhattan Projects somehow manages to slide on this, I think because Hickman uses real life scientists from history to tell his wildly impossible story, they lend a natural air of authenticity to even the bighest of bullshit science, while at the same time Hickman is so talented a writer as to make work an alternate history of some of our greatest super-scientists, and send it off in utterly ridiculous directions.
It's such a fascinating book that kind of has only gotten better as its moved on. I had, early on, wondered how it would survive past its first arc, thinking incorrectly it once again being another of Hickman's great mini-series. I also considered dropping the title, back around issue 9, but I've stuck with it and have been nothing more than enthralled.
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