Killing off the humans
It’s funny trying to keep a handle on Tsutomu Nihei. Reeling from the last chapters of Blame!, I felt a sort of awe toward the man, badsed in admiration for his uncompromising aesthetics and trippy semi-comprehensibility.
It’s the aspect of punishment in reading his work which make it work this way - the persistent difficulty of working out what anyone’s doing and why makes Blame! an engrossing project. By making us work Nihei fosters obsessive and meticulous reading habits. Almost, almost, he achieves in a sci-fi manga that curious faux-historical affect I normally associate with big novels and srs bsns films. It might be as close as you can get to making something that feels like a missive from a posthuman world.
And since, mid-reel, I was now starting on a bit of a manga kick, it was clearly necessary to jump straight into the first volumes of Nihei’s Biomega. In so far as I gathered anything before reading, I gathered there was a talking bear in it. And, in keeping with a series in which there is a fucking Talking Bear, there is indeed rather more comedy in this than Blame!.
What comes with the odd bit of gallows humour is an increased emotional expressiveness quite in keeping with the fact that Biomega is substantially less far into the cold dark future than Niehei’s debut manga. And if that makes the situation more human, it also makes it more horrifying.
Niehi is all about the technological singularity: the moment in which humanity is able to redefine itself from the ground up. In Blame! that time was long past, and even the nominally “human” characters were genetically modified and technologically enhanced creatures.
In Biomega humanity is in the early stages of redundancy, but it’s still around. Because Nihei places the centres of technological innovation in corporate armies he breaks up the utopian technological singularity in which humanity is suddenly and triumphantly empowered to shrug off old bonds. Instead it’s a process of vicious selection in which humans are simply ill equipped to handle the apocalyptic.
That’s a zombie apocalypse, by the way.
And yeah, zombies are Horror territory. And yeah Nihei plays with ‘it’s behind you!’, with strangers knocking at the door, with moody lighting, leatherfaces, bloody aprons and all that horror junk. But what’s actually horrifying about Biomega, what makes it distressing where Blame! was provocative, is that setting in the era of human irrelevance.
Our synthetic hero is mainly threatened by his rival posthumans. Regular people and zombies are rushing zergs, hopeless minor obstacles. Early in the story Cibo his glamorous assistant facepalms as he massacres a few enemy soldiers. Later on, when Nihei starts indulging himself, things get worse. We are given to understand that humanity is in danger of extinction. Only some of the remaining humans are on The Wrong Side, so we get to watch the good guy, a cold killer raised in a flask, punching their endangered heads open, tearing them apart in crowdfuls.
The actual genre of Biomega sits between action and horror. The showdowns are a bit too confrontational for pure horror - with new adversaries foreshadowed, encountered, and spectacularly defeated. So when I say this is horrifying stuff I’m talking about something insidious as much as about an immediate reaction. Because Biomega doesn’t make the reader work all that much for their kicks, but its world is deep in suffering and our action heroes are harbingers of the end.
Niehei’s singularity is a battlefield in which humanity just is far too fragile. Progress isn’t something people embrace, it’s something which creates instability, fosters war, and destroys those in its way. At times Blame!’s far far future could feel semi-metaphorical - a commentary on our love of machines taken to absurd dystopian levels. Biomega is close enough to humanity to dispel that kind of highflown idea. Nihei isn’t just fantasising about the future, he’s feeling the thrill of our self-destruction.
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* Of course I’m only two volumes into this, so I’m sure there’s a bunch more to say. It’s worth noting that Biomega is published in some rather spiffy editions, and that Nihei’s art is just terrific in print.