Contains minor spoilers
If there's one thing that the internet has cursed us with it's what I like to refer to as 'Wiki-brain,' though to be more accurate 'Lore-brain,' is probably the more descriptive term. It's the tendency for fan communities to reduce the fictional stories they love down to statistics and backstory. The desire to quantity and record for posterity every piece of information a text provides, no matter how trivial it is.
I think it was Hbomberguy who said something along the lines of "Wookiepedia can tell you Chewbacca's exact height and weight but it can't tell you a thing about the themes of the story he comes from." As such I kind of feel there's been a bit of a backlash of late against excessive world-building and creators constantly trying to over-explain every minor aspect of their fictional universes.
There's probably a whole other essay I could write about how thematic constancy is more important than narrative consistency, but I don't think we need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. There's room enough for stories that play fast and loose with their own continuity in order for the story to come first, but I think that there's just a compelling argument to make that the cure for 'Lore-brain," can also be in telling stories where a drip feed of backstory can be so much more compelling than world guides and appendices, or, god forbid, fan wikis and TV Tropes.
This long winded into bring me to Simon Roy's Grobusverse, for want of a better name. A collection of comics set in a fictional, fractured future. I've discussed entries within this universe before, but this essay is going to be less a review of the stories specifically and more about how Roy chooses to communicate this universe to his audience.
Starting with Habitat in 2017, I was immediately drawn towards the visual aesthetic that Roy conjured to depict this techno-barbaric future. Set on board a space habitat in the style of Arthur C Clarke's Rama, the comic tells the story of warring tribes battling for supremacy using mostly long forgotten technology after having been left behind by whatever galactic community exists beyond the habitat's sealed airlocks. The technology itself looks crunchy and believable. The olive green and industrial orange of it's mech-suits, cargo walkers and harpoon guns all look like they have come from some alternate cold-war Europe, bastard children of Aliens' power loader and Red Alert 2's Soviet Super tech, rather than some far future space utopia.
It's all the more surprising then to find that the habitat also once played host to some kind of dormant god-like creature who seems biological in nature but is otherwise intricately connected to the populace's lost technology.
Habitat is for the most part a completely self contained story. By the end characters have completed both their narrative arcs and completed their stated objectives to bring new life to the habitat's savage world. Yet as a reader so many breadcrumbs are left hanging in the air. Just what is the state of the galaxy beyond the habitat? What cataclysm led to their abandonment? What is the true nature of the colossal creature dormant within the superstructure's depths? Why exactly are the combat robots also representatives of the Catholic church?
Habitat is filled with so many tantalising backstory details that go unexplained, but get into the reader's head in such a way that they can't help but speculate. Had the series have seen a continuation these backstory elements may well have been filled out in a understandable, orderly fashion, but Simon Roy's retro-techno-future world would sit dormant for a few years before seeing it's revival in webcomic form. Though the direction it decided to go in was to zig almost certainly where one would expect it to zag.
Griz Grobus, far from taking place on a high-tech space habitat, would instead pull us down to Altamera, a colony world that appears to be just as cut off from the greater universe as their space dwelling cousins were. Instead of a jungle climate filled with warring tribes, we find snowy mountaintops and forest glades, and a frontier-like community of loggers, miners and trappers. The technology is still present, but like in Habitat, poorly understood, with archaeologists and academics doing their best to try and piece together what little even operates.
Griz Grobus delves more into the mysterious robotic priesthood, who still seem to keep the faith with Lord Jesus Christ despite having little concern for their religion's near extinction amongst the populace. Fittingly, this story is told side by side with a folkloric fable of rampaging warlords and magical geese. A reminder that even on the other side of the galaxy strong stories can hold great power.
Like Habitat, Griz Grobus only drip-feeds it's backstory, hinting at possible explanations for the state of the universe here and there. Interestingly, the Kickstarter edition came with a small guidebook to the "Thinking Machines of the Apostolic Congress." Presented as an in-universe artefact, this guide book details the different forms of robo-priest and their intended purposes, but notably gives NO information as to why these machines appear to be specifically Christian in origin.
I hope it's clear by now what it is in Roy's approach I find so appealing here. No doubt he could easily fill the book's back matter with timelines and backstory and faction guides and whatnot, but a huge part of the enjoyment comes from the journey, not the destination. Like the characters within the stories themselves, we often lack context surrounding their discoveries, and like the archaeologists and artefact hunters, we have to analyse and interpret from incomplete data.
As the Grobusverse would continue, so too would we continue to interpret. A short comic, The Envoy and the Warrior, sheds more light on the colossal superbeings we witnessed at the end of Habitat, and only hints at what great cataclysm may have brought down humanity's spacefaring civilisation. Miramar would take us to yet another isolated planet, this time an ocean world to show how the human remnants would adapt differently with their limited technological knowledge when subjected to new environments.
Refugium would return us to Alamira, but this time looking at ecology rather than technology. Refugium would, ironically, contain probably the most significant amount of lore so far but it would be almost entirely be regarding the original flora and fauna of the planet long before it was overwritten by human terraforming. Once again, we are left to infer backstory from information that is most relevant to the characters within the moment.
Critically, this attitude constantly reminds the readers that the people of these worlds come first, not the setting they inhabit. Their human experiences, hopes, fears, losses and gains, are what have and will drive the arc of history we only at times get small glimpses of. I have no doubt Roy could probably explain in fine details the mechanics of how the mech-suits work, but it's just so much more compelling to discover that from a struggling mechanic desperately trying to keep the thing working.
More than anything I think Roy's world reminds us that despite periods that we refer to as "dark ages" human beings are not inherently stupid. People didn't magically forget how everything worked after the Roman Empire fell. Instead language and literature was stratified. Knowledge could not easily be replicated and passed along. Some sciences were maintained unchanged, while others passed into folklore and superstition, while others still were lost.
That so much of what is going on in the Grobusverse is obscured, hinted at, there to be scrutinised by inquisitive readers, is a great example of how we can address that pesky 'lore-brain' without reducing world-building to a big list of stuff that happened. It's a very specific way of trusting the audience and respecting the integrity of the work. It creates not just a fun story but a mystery to be solved with you as the investigator.
Roy has been very clear that there is much more to come, with a guide to "Man-Amplifiers of the Euhumanist League," no doubt giving us only just enough information to lead to more speculation. It's been a wild ride so far, and I'm hoping it's just getting started. I have no idea what little titbit will trickle out of the plot next, but I can't wait to dust the edges and study it's form in the hopes I can glean it's context.
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Jack Harvey (2024)
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