Review by Frank Plowright

Eric is part of a crew put to sleep on Arka III, a giant colonisation spacecraft. When he wakes up the ship has landed on a planet, but it’s not the planned location, no stars are visible, and maintenance hasn’t been taking place. The remaining crew gradually realise they’ve asleep longer than the planned two hundred years. So where are they and what’s gone wrong?

The answer to that is novel from Romain Benassaya, after which escape is the priority for most, but not everyone. The other primary character Johanna is an exobiologist amazed at how creations designed to maintain a vast forest area have evolved outside the ship. She sees no purpose in wasting valuable energy when everything beyond the craft is a mystery.

While certainly accomplished and packed with detail, there’s also something very old-fashioned about Joan Urgell’s art, which has the look of pages prepared in the 1960s for the higher quality British weekly comics. The design work featuring holographic technology is one of very few factors revealing more modern origins.

Project Arka adapts Benassaya’s 2016 novel, and perhaps there’s greater balance to that as it’s not until the concluding quarter that the fundamentals spring into life. Humanity under stress becomes a primary theme, but the emotions causing much of the stress aren’t greatly convincing as they’re founded on an argument protracted for an unfeasibly long time. Exploration and possible escape, or colonisation becomes the abiding schism, and with options limited specific skill sets acquire prominence, which is clever. Not so clever is so obviously basing the threat from outside the community on Dune.

Interesting in places, but Project Arka is ultimately derivative, looks old fashioned, and the ending’s not greatly satisfying either.