Dream with Our Eyes Open

On a Sunbeam was first published as a webcomic and has been nominated for this year's Hugo Awards in the Graphic Novel category. Apologies to anyone who loves this: I finished it feeling more bemused than anything.

Mia is starting a new job. We see her peering through a window in a spaceship, approaching what seems to be a cathedral floating in space. Tethered to it are a variety of things: some are close to conventional depictions of SF spacecraft, but one looks like a camper bus and another looks like nothing in particular. Mia gets off her transport and is guided into an elevator, which takes her to a corridor with a tall door at the end.

No sign of an airlock.

Through the door is the spacecraft that will be her new home and her transportation to her new employer's job sites. There are high ceilings, random boxes of stuff on the floor, a cat. She's directed to sit on a bench. The pilot tells her to hold on. No seatbelts or any other restraint are in use,

The ships takes off with a slight hint of acceleration in the drawing: maybe as much as an automobile pulling away from a traffic signal.

And then we get an outside view of the ship. It looks like a cross between a goldfish and a pigeon.

So yes, this is certainly not any sort of hard science fiction. We are in science fantasy territory, and it's rather odd even for that.

As Mia gets to know her new workmates and boss, who are engaged in reconstructing and preserving historical buildings (which seem to be simply floating in space), we get flashbacks to her boarding school days. She's a difficult child without many friends at first, and then she makes friends with a bright loner named Grace. The two fall sweetly in love, and then Grace has to leave abruptly in response to a family emergency.

Mia doesn't get to say goodbye.

In the story's present, Mia becomes close to her crewmates, but she's also obsessed with her first love and the farewell she never got. Because Grace's home is a mysterious, dangerous, forbidden world, it seems impossible that Mia will ever see Grace again.

Or is it?

The story is powerful on an emotional level, but just about every other aspect of it left me thinking "... what?" I'm not talking about the fact that everyone seems to be female (except for one character who is specifically described as non-binary), which is an interesting choice (after all, many classic SF stories contain only male characters, with possibly some women as memories or prizes but not really characters). I'm talking about things like the way space itself is not nearly as hostile an environment as Grace's world. The accident with the fish-spaceship at the end, for example ... .

The artwork makes me think most of Mushishi: the same kind of apparently simple drawings that are ably grounded in anatomy and perspective. But instead of Mushishi's grey wash and textures, we have flat color, maybe one or two shades per frame.

Despite the trappings of future and space fiction, I find it easier to think of the setting for On a Sunbeam as something like Diana Wynne Jone's Multiverse. The journeys from world to world really do seem to me to be more like going from one magical dimension to another.

It's not *bad*, but it didn't really hit any of my sweet spots.

ETA: And it should have, because HELLO, families of choice, big time. But I couldn't connect.