Valerian: The City of Shifting Waters

 

The City of Shifting Waters: Valerian and Laureline are playing a game of 3D Chess (nod to Star Trek) when word arrives that Xombul has escaped and traveled to New York City, circa 1986.  The chief technocrat explains that 1986 is the year the old world collapsed and a 400 year dark age followed.  Oddly enough, the entire era is off-limits to time travelers but, as Xombul has gone there, Valerian is dispatched.  Laureline will be held in reserve.  Valerian arrives to find New York City partially submerged, all the streets having become water ways for a gang of looters.  No sooner has he found a sign that may lead him to Xombul than he is captured by looters and forced into slave labor.  Several days pass before Laureline arrives and helps him escape.  However, they will need reinforcements to face Xombul and his robots.  Valerian returns to the looter leader, Sun Rae, and convinces him to join forces.  Even with the aid of the looters, they are overcome and captured.  Put on a hovercraft, they escape the city as a tsunami topples the skyscrapers.

 

This proved to be just part one of a two part story.  It was unexpected to see a return of Xombul since he had been turned into a bird and put in a bird cage at the conclusion of the last story.  The idea of a 400 year window where time travel is banned is nonsensical.  The whole point is to protect the timeline but they have no clue what happened in this period?  Silly.  The only thing that was known was that an atomic bomb detonated at the North Pole and caused global warming, the ice caps melting, cities flooding, and constant earthquakes.  For a story written in 1970, it sounds like it might have been a source for Al Gore's Earth in the Balance (1992).

Earth in Flames: The hovercraft takes them all the way to the Rocky Mountains (years before Kevin Costner's Waterworld) before they transfer to a helicopter and arrive at a mountain fortress near Yellowstone.  Sun Rae the looter is amenable to joining Xombul's plot to rebuild the world with Xombul as dictator but Valerian is not.  Xombul knows how to fix that.  He uses a shrinking ray to make Laureline only a few inches tall with plans to keep her in his pocket and always have Valerian on a short leash.  Though Laureline is shrunken, the plan is foiled when an enslaved scientist turns on Xombul.  The story continues with a constant back and forth as Xombul or Valerian has the upperhand before the story concludes at a space station orbiting Earth.

 

The funniest thing about this story was Mr. Schroeder the scientist.  He is obviously Jerry Lewis as the Nutty Professor.  Because Valerian is a French comic series and the French regard Lewis so highly, this was hilarious.  As written, he is far beyond genius and would likely hold his own with a scientist of the 28th century.  High praise indeed to Jerry Lewis.

 

This two-part epic was better than Bad Dreams though it also has the time travel nonsense.  Flooded NYC made for a great setting (3 decades before A.I. Artificial Intelligence).  The action is plentiful.  I am surprised this hasn't been adapted to the big screen before now.