Scott Westerfeld has written some pretty harsh dystopian futures in the past tense , including the Uglies serial . But now , he ’s written a graphical novel that necessitate home after an Revelation . The Spill Zone features art by Alex Puvilland , and we ’re happy to bring you the announcement and the single first look !
Here ’s the official synopsis for The Spill Zone , coming from First Second :
Nobody ’s ever really explained the Spill . Was it an angelic visitation ? A nanotech stroke ? A porthole opening night from another world ? Whatever it was , no one ’s allowed in the Spill Zone these days except governance scientists and hazmat team . But a few hardy Internet Explorer know how to sneak through the patrol and manoeuvre clear of the dangers inside the Zone . Addison Merrick is one such explorer , dedicated to recover out what happen that night , and to unraveling the events that take her parents and leave her little sister deaf-and-dumb person and unplug from the humanity .
“ I ’ve been writing The Spill Zone for seven long time , ” Westerfeld says in a public press release , “ and am overjoyed to be partner with First Second on my first graphic novel . Alex Puvilland ’s bright artwork has the perfect Libra the Scales of grit and spirituality to bring in the Zone to lifespan . ”
Here ’s another amazing artistry patch :
And here ’s Westerfeld ’s essay about the conception of the volume , followed by one more prowess piece :
Scott Westerfeld on The Spill Zone:
In 2004 , a Ukrainian photojournalist named Elena Filatova ( aka KiddofSpeed ) blogged an account of her motorcycle journeying though the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone . Her photos and writing were elegiac and apocalyptic , evoke the otherworldliness of the forsaken metropolis of Pripyat . But soon after the posts were Slashdotted , sure discrepancies were note , and Filatova accept that her account were “ more poetry than reality . ”
In shortsighted , she might have take a enlistment coach .
But the poetical version cleave with me — a cleaning lady on a motorcycle , a television camera , an empty and dangerous world .
Since the tardy 1970s , when I read Roadside Picnic , I ’ve loved story about exploring break , abandoned terrain . Boris and Arkady Strugatsky ’s novel is do in and around the Visitation Zone , a place where aliens landed , play around for a couple of years , and left behind various miracles that were , to them , simply garbage to be discarded . The Zone is off limits , but is plundered by crafty interlopers known as “ Stalkers ” ( who give their name to the Tarkovsky film and the video biz ground on the novel ) .
I opine it was Roadside Picnic that made me an “ urban adventurer , ” though that term was n’t around back then . As a student I spelunked the buildings at my upstate New York college , and I ’ve research give up site in and around NYC since . There ’s nothing quite like the silent solitariness of a place that has been abandon , cut back , and left to ruin . In these spaces , the usual rules do n’t apply . It can feel as if the laws of aperient do n’t either .
So what if they really were a slice of another world ?
Spill Zone is set in a working - class town in upstate NY that changed one night three years ago , when something unearthly and awful happened . Unlike in Roadside Picnic , the lawsuit of the Spill is n’t known . possibly it was a nano outbreak sweep with the local nuclear industrial plant , or perhaps a portal opening from another world , one more Lovecraftian than ours .
Whatever happened , the Spill Zone is n’t a office you desire to go anymore . Staring at the light in the storm drains gives you nightmares , and once you ’ve seen mealy worms take down a cervid , you wo n’t ever take the air on the grass again . ( And do n’t get me start up on the meat puppet . ) But the strangest part is the sense of an intelligence activity at work , a playful but inhuman force that renovate the standing wave — whirlwinds of empty wearable , swing sets that never stop get around . The Spill Zone is a character as well as a scene .
break into the SZ might be illegal , but pure hermetic seals are hard to build . My explore days have taught me that it ’s very hard to keep people out of large areas . I ’ve had booster roam into unrecorded fire zones by accident , and consecrate anti - nuclear protestors have infract even the well - patrolled boundaries .
On top of which , Addison Merritt , my protagonist , has local knowledge on her side . She rise up in the Ithiel Town now at the philia of the Zone . She was lucky enough to have been away during the Spill , having snuck out to do a trivial underage drinking a few towns over . Her parents disappeared that night , but her little babe was one of the few to make it out alive . No one get it on how exactly Lexa escaped , because she has n’t talk a word since . ( Well , except to her doll Vespertine , but no one can hear those conversation write you , the lucky reader . )
Like any good urban explorer , Addison contract only photographs from the Zone , and leaves only footprint — or rather , bike raceway , thanks to Ms. Filatova . Her photograph are illegal enough that she has to sell them secretly , to collector who keep her originals obliterate and ( mostly ) uncopied , more like the Victorian erotica swop than the modern prowess world .
Then one day one of her collector ask her to bring an objective back from the Zone , something very specific and unthinkably life-threatening . And Addison must decide whether to divulge her chief rule : Never Get off the Bike .
work with me to make the humanity inside the Spill Zone alien and unsettling are creative person Alex Puvilland ( Templar , Prince of Persia ) and colorist Hilary Sycamore ( Battling Boy , The Shade ) . Together , they ’ve create a world that ’s both foreign and beautiful , and characters that look like they belong in the hardscrabble upstate Zone towns that some downstaters still call “ Tawana Brawley nation . ”
Despite all its other influences , what I ’ve hop-skip to create most of all is captured in a line from Buffy the Vampire Slayer ( S1E12 ) , about see a room of people killed by lamia : “ And when I walk in there , it . . . it was n’t our human beings any longer . They made it theirs . And they had fun . ”
BooksComicsgraphic novelsScott Westerfeld
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