Fies, Brian
Entry updated 11 August 2018. Tagged: Author.
(? - ) US cartoonist and author whose Graphic Novel, Whatever Happened to The World of Tomorrow? (graph 2009), dramatizes the American dream of a Technology-led drive towards a Utopian future centred on a continuous move into space. The narrative traces from 1939 on a recognizable sf advocacy of early Future History, and contains several inserted tales from an imaginary Space Opera Comic-book, Space Age Adventures between 1939 and 1975, featuring Commander Cap Crater's mission to frustrate the continuing Villain, Dr Xandra, in his attempts to create top-down Dystopias. The Parody of sf comics is extremely affectionate, though it is clear that Xandra's vision of the world of tomorrow is more accurate than that inarticulately espoused by Cap Crater; and provides a counterstory to the version of things to come embedded in the main narrative, which carries on from the World's Fair and Futurama on into the dark times after 1969 and the ending of the dream that we would soon be conquering space. Some hope dawns at the end, in the Near Future, where Nanotechnologies and cost-efficient Power Sources are seen as a potential escape from the collapse of world civilization. Figures whose accomplishments are worked into the narrative include Chesley Bonestell, Arthur C Clarke, Walt Disney [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below] – whose never-realized Xandra-like vision of a radial "Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow" (EPCOT) near Orlando, Florida, is here cited – and Wernher von Braun. [JC]
Brian Fies
born
works (selected)
- Whatever Happened to The World of Tomorrow? (New York: Abrams Comicarts, 2009) [graph: illus/hb/Brian Fies]
links
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