“Breakdown on the Starship Remembrance”

“Breakdown on the Starship Remembrance” is one of many texts collected in an anthology of P. Craig Russell’s work, titled Isolation and Illusion: Collected Short Stories 1977-1997. Ironically, Lieutenant Jordon Alexander—who, from an early age, has romanticized space travel—suffers a mental breakdown while serving on the starship Remembrance where “fantasies of Venusian summers and Plutonian nights are replaced by … the ultimate inertia of routine activity” (100). Alexander steals a shuttle pod and flees to a nearby planet where he finds solace. Russell’s realistic black and white illustrations allow the reader to empathize with Alexander and symbolize the mind-rending dichotomy that has been his experience with space travel—the actual and the ideal. Russell concludes with two possible endings—one in which Alexander makes his dreams come true and one in which he abandons them. “Breakdown on the Starship Remembrance” could serve as ancillary text to George Orwell’s Animal Farm as an example of a course of action which fails to fulfill its initial promise.

“Breakdown on the Starship Remembrance” by P. Craig Russel l
High School
Dark Horse Comics
23pp.
Published 1979
ISBN 1-56971-838-5
$14.95

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