Blame! Review

Nihei's subject is volume. The megastructure is drawn as stairwells that vanish into vanishing points, catwalks over drops with no floor, and rooms whose far wall is kilometres away, and the reader's sense of being very small in something very large is produced by draughtsmanship alone rather than by anyone saying so. Nobody else has done this as well. The blacks are heavy, the linework is fine and mechanical, and the silence is deliberate, since Killy speaks perhaps a few dozen times across the whole run and the story is delivered almost entirely through what the drawings contain.

That is also the limitation, and it should be stated plainly. The plot is a fetch quest whose terms are explained once, in passing, and the action sequences are frequently illegible even by the standards of a book that wants disorientation. Characters barely exist, with Cibo the only figure who develops. What survives is influence, because a generation of science fiction artists and game designers took their sense of architectural dread directly from these pages. Read it for the spaces and forgive the rest.