Its Making Or Its Undoing: Discussing ‘ARKS Proximan’ With Creator Rory Collins

ARKS is a comic book series about space travel, but don’t expect massive starships or teleporters to whisk humans from one planet to the next. Instead, it involves director panspermia, or the transport of microorganisms into space to introduce a human-like species on another world. With several crowdfunded comic books in the series already published, creator Rory Collins has launched a Kickstarter campaign for the next part of the story, ARKS Proximan. In a Comicon exclusive, Collins discusses why he considers the series to be a procedural and what modern science fiction stories are missing.

Tom Smithyman: Talk a little bit about this story and how it is different from the other ARKS books.

Rory Collins: The main ARKS story has an Adam and Eve motif, and it’s really leaning into that. I personally love the parallels between the Promethean and Judeo-Christian origin stories, and ARKS is inspired by them in a way but I think there is a chance that this isn’t for everyone so ARKS Proximan is more of its own thing. Much more recognizable, a bit mainstream with relatable characters, situations etc. It’s still a nasty `80s sci-fi, but mainstream.

Smithyman: The overall ARKS story feels a bit like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, only humans are actually responsible for the pods this time. Is that a fair assessment?

Collins: Yes. Absolutely. When I first had the idea I thought about making a Stephen King-style horror where another civilization uses its bacteria to colonize Earth (Robin Cook’s Invasion wink wink!). But personally, I think that story has already been made a thousand times and what I wanted, was a hard sci-fi procedural about how the process would actually work. I think it has to be that way because the ideas in the story are so out there, that if you don’t normalize it, people won’t believe it’s possible.

Which of course it is 😉

Smithyman: With terms like “exonatal” and “directed panspermia,” you seem to be targeting a discerning and highly intelligent audience. Are you at all concerned about alienating readers?

Collins: I think people make good art when they do it for themselves. I’m making this comic for myself and one of my favorite things is vernacular. I love listening to knowledgeable people talk about a topic that I don’t understand. It’s like poetry to me. It can be about anything; cooking, badminton, open heart surgery. I can’t get enough of it.

I hate it when art gets written down for a broad appeal, so people can “understand it.” I think that’s one of the really crappy things that has happened to contemporary sci-fi this century. Writers say they are writing sci-fi when they are just homogenizing a lot of old/existing ideas that are incredibly similar to franchises that already exist so that it has broad appeal and they have a market to sell it to. Then you end up with nearly two decades of crap, tribute act sci-fi. Real sci-fi to me should be alienating. It should be like Arrival or Under the Skin. It should creep you the fuck out.

There is absolutely no market for ARKS. Nothing like it exists. It’s a new flavor of ice cream. This will be its making or its undoing!

Maybe you’re right. Maybe I should get rid of the big words 🙁

Smithyman: Well you’ve clearly found some market for it with your previous successful crowdfunding campaigns. What do you think today’s science fiction is missing?

Collins: Science! Almost all of the contemporary science fiction in films, TV and comics have no science in them. They’re futuristic fiction/fantasy. There are some great science fiction books but they won’t make it into the mainstream because they are too expensive to produce into a TV show, film or even a comic.

But we get unwanted remakes of classics and mediocre Star Wars serials every other month so it’s not all bad.

Foundation on Apple TV is the exception and it is pretty good. Over-wrought but good 😉

Smithyman: You are working with Naralie Malla on the script for this story. What is that creative process like? And how does working with artist Erich Owen complicate that process?

Collins: It’s super simple really. Me and Natalie get together and work out the beats of the issue. Natalie writes the first draft (the hardest bit), I write the second draft (the easiest bit) and then we cross-edit each other and it’s done. On this occasion, I made quite detailed storyboards before I started to work with Erich, which he didn’t need because he is a much better artist than me.

Smithyman: Natalie has spoken about the brutal reality of building new worlds in space. Is humanity’s destiny in the stars or do we need to prioritize fixing Earth?

Collins: I think, ironically, the easiest way to save the world is by trying to leave it.

From the NASA moon landings we got aluminum, satellite navigation, GPS, telecommunications, artificial limbs, weather forecasting, wireless headsets, LED lighting, portable cordless tools, freeze-dried foods, memory foam, scratch-resistant lenses, water purification systems, smoke detectors, ear thermometers, solar panels and my personal favorite a pen that works in zero-G.

And we got all that just by trying to put a few humans on the moon. Imagine what we’d achieve if we were able to compress the genome of every creature on the planet into a bacteria and transport them to other worlds.

Something better than a zero-G pen at least.

Smithyman: There’s been a lot of talk about UFOs and government cover ups lately. Do you think we’ve been visited by aliens in spaceships, or is it simply not feasible given the sheer vastness of space?

Collins: If they have found ‘UFOs’ and ‘non-human biologics,’ I think it is proof that we are living in a simulation, not that there is extraterrestrial life visiting us. A spaceship capable of transporting life at superluminal speeds would need to create the same amount of energy that you would need to compress the Earth to the size of a basketball. A civilization that has this level of mastery over energy and matter would have:

A) Destroyed itself by creating a black hole.
B) Irradiated and sterilized their entire population attempting to make a singularity.
C) Created an infinite universe simulation, made themselves god inside it and entertained themselves by pretending to be aliens that kidnap farmers.

I think there are almost certainly aliens but the likelihood that we ever meet them is vanishingly slim. If we do, it’ll be a similar scenario to the one depicted in our comic 😉

Smithyman: Well, if we’re living in a simulation, I need to speak to someone about an upgrade! Good luck with the campaign and the next ARKS series.