Review by Frank Plowright

Outpost Zero is a really clever concoction. In one sense it’s a slow burner, but if considering the sheer amount of information about the situation and people delivered over the course of The Smallest Town in the Universe, it was a packed book. A community is trapped within a protective dome on a frozen planet never intended to support human life. Although technical magic makes it seem as if the sun shines down on a small American town, the reality is the protective dome in danger of cracking due to the massive amount of ice dumped on it during a storm. If the dome cracks, everyone will die, yet there are also grave concerns in the community about opening the airlock to deal with the ice. Everything in this volume has that danger hanging over it.

Lead character Alea has learned of the mysterious Genship Ancestry Project, and received some advice from a now dead friend to follow it down, although she’s unaware of what that means beyond investigating disconnected technology beneath the outpost.

Sean Kelley McKeever and Alexandre Tefenkgi are extremely good at including short, disconcerting scenes that lack any direct explanation, but which obviously fit into the bigger picture. This type of foreshadowing has already paid off, and works spectacularly well with a leap into the unknown, and with a couple of scenes featuring the aggressive Mitchell and his tragic twin sister, previously mentioned, but never seen. Also foreshadowed are people knowing secrets about the adopted Sam, which become key.

McKeever’s storytelling is unconventional, time moving forward between pages, but always with something acknowledging that, and individual scenes only rarely extending beyond three pages. That’s partly because there’s a fair few members of the cast, but also because McKeever’s not just focussing on the investigations Alea is carrying out, but the societal tensions and pressures of leadership. These are generally extrapolated in terms of secrets, some of which Alea is uncovering.

As in the first volume, Tefenkgi is spectacularly good, defining people and places while his pages are always constructed with the discipline to ensure events are clear. It’s astonishing art from someone starting their career.

A stunner of an ending introduces a new character, making The Only Living Things an essential read, or the entire series is gathered in the slightly smaller format The Complete Collection.