Jean-Claude Mézières (1938–2022)

This volume seems to me to be one of the lynchpins of the whole series of Valerian. It's two two-parters, in which the main characters travel back to the 1980s, and alter the course of history drastically. In one of the early books, they had gone back to 1986, where there had been a nuclear war and resulting apocalypse, and the authors realized that date was approaching too quickly. In one of these, they avert the nuclear apocalypse (and then Chernobyl actually happened in 1986, after the publication of these - it was later added into the alternative timeline as what happened instead of the nuclear war!), but in doing so, they cause the inadvertent destruction of the timeline that Valerian actually comes from, including Galaxity, his hitherto employer.

Christin and Mézières always played the time travel elements of their stories loosely, but at this point it became outright confusing for me, and I had to look up a plot summary online to realize what was actually going on. That's my main concern with this one - in fact, the whole volume was a bit like that. Despite that, I've definitely gotten into the series now and I'm enjoying it a lot.… (mehr)