"Space Sector Some Number, Nobody Ever Bothered to Tell Me. Far. The farthest of the Guardians' 3,600 sectors. Maybe farther. Maybe it doesn't have a number."
— Jo, Far Sector #1
Sojourner "Jo" Mullein is the newest Green Lantern from Earth, but she wasn't assigned to Earth. Instead, she was given a special ring and a special mission: her sector would be the farthest sector out, specifically in the City Enduring, an alien city of over twenty billion beings. A city made up of three races that have successfully repressed their emotions so that nobody has been murdered in the city... until now.
Far, far from home, Jo has to keep the people of the City Enduring safe, keep the peace, and figure out the mystery, beyond the edge of everything.
Far Sector is a twelve issue mini-series from Young Animal, written by N. K. Jemisin, with art by Jamal Campbell.
Far Sector includes the following tropes:
- Achilles' Heel: Jo's Green Lantern ring differs from other rings in two ways. It slowly replenishes itself when not in active use and doesn't require a Green Lantern battery. However, it is a lot weaker than other rings and if its energy is depleted it can take hours, maybe even days, to recharge.
- Afrofuturism: It certainly plays around with it, as Jo herself is black, while one of the Trilogy, the Nah, appear to be black.
- Alien Sky: "That sky's not real. Each day, the city builds a new composite sky image from its citizens' imaginations." However, there is a single moment during the day when the image stops and you can see the actual sky and the red sun.
- Amicable Exes: Jo and her roommate, Siz, dated for a short while after Jo came to the city. It didn't work out, but they're still close. They get back together at the end of the series.
- Artificial Intelligence: The @At are basically sentient search engines that feed off memes for nourishment.
- At Least I Admit It: Averrup is pretty up front with how he'd like to eat Jo but won't because he knows Jo wouldn't want to be eaten. His honesty contrasts him with his more duplicitous colleagues @Blaze-of-Glory and Marth which is why his later death hits Jo so hard.
- The Alternet: The @At use a Matrix-style internet as their natural home. Jo uses her ring to digitize herself to go in to capture Averrup's killers.
- The Atoner: Jo wishes to atone for a moment of inaction she had while a cop on Earth.
- Bio-Augmentation: The City has the means to rewrite biology using engineered viruses, called "meatware", that only the @Ats can code.
- Brooklyn Rage: At a point when Jo's ring is dangerously low, she notes she can make up for it as an ex-cop, an ex-soldier, and being born and raised in Brooklyn.
- Call a Human a "Meatbag": The @At refer to organic beings as "meat salads".
- City Noir: With the murder and the rain, that's what a lot of the book comes across.
- City Planet: The City Enduring, a city at the farthest reaches of space where twenty billion beings live. It was also built out of the ashes of the two previous planets that had been destroyed.
- Comic-Book Fantasy Casting: Jemisin has confirmed in interviews that Jo's design was explicitly based on Janelle Monáe.
- The Conspiracy:
- Marth has been engineering an uprising against his own government to overthrow the use of Emotional Exploit and reintroduce emotions back to the City Enduring. His so-far-unseen sister— stated by Marth to be more militant and directly violent than he, seems to also be involved.
- @Blaze-of-Glory has been secretly planning a fake attack from the Cloud Kratocracy, the Trilogy's ancient enemies, in order to manipulate herself into complete control of the City Enduring so she doesn't have to deal with the slower-thinking "meat salads" countermanding her. The murder kicking off the plot was because someone got too close to discovering her schemes.
- Crystal Spires and Togas: Clearly what the City Enduring is trying to be and has been for a while... but now a murder has happened and more will follow.
- Dark Secret: Jo witnessed her partner on the police force brutalize a suspect and did nothing in the moment. Much of her drive in the story is based in atoning for this inaction.
- Desperately Looking for a Purpose in Life: Jo was this before she became a Green Lantern. She joined the Army after 9/11 but became disillusioned with what she saw abroad. She later joined the police but that ended when she witnessed her partner beating a suspect.
- Dyson Sphere: The City Enduring is one, although only some of the pentagonal "panels" are fully covered and inhabitable. It apprently took the entire resources of two whole planets (and likely every other celestial body in the system).
- Emotion Suppression: After the destruction of their homeworlds, the Trilogy decided to suppress their emotions with something called the "Emotion Exploit" and then build the City Enduring. That isn't to say that they have no emotions — they are often seen with the regular emotions normal people have — but before, their emotions were, well, much more destructive.
- Empathy Doll Shot: The cover to the fourth issue shows Jo noticing an abandoned stuffed toy left on a ground covered with Chalk Outlines.
- Enigmatic Empowering Entity: Jo was given her power ring directly by a Guardian, much like Kyle Rayner, and like Kyle her ring works differently than the others.
- Fantastic Drug: Due to the Trilogy suppressing their emotions, the people of the City Enduring can now fall prey to a drug called "Switchoff." It apparently switches off the Emotion Exploit that suppresses their emotion, resulting in murder.
- Fantastic Naming Convention:
- For the Nah, their names consist of the place where they come from ("Lumir of the Cliffs, By the Wavering Dark"), while more important people will have an additional phrase indicating a time of day ("Marth of the Sea, By the Wavering Dark, Until the Sun Falls").
- For the @Ats, all their names sound like Twitter handles (@Blaze-of-Glory), going with the fact that they are non-biological life forms.
- The most traditional names are the keh-Topli, who have names like "Averrup Thorn, of the Dry Season Thorns."
- Fantastic Racism: The three races of the Trilogy appear to have some racism towards each other — at one point, during a meeting, the representation of the Nah accuses the representative of the @At of being about to call them "meat salads."
- The Trilogy, while not exactly racist, has certain prejudices of outsiders that don't always match up. Since the Trilogy's emotions are supressed, people like Siz think humans are driven completely by emotions at all time, and are surprised that Jo knows how to keep them in check.
- Fantastic Slur: "Meat salad," a derogatory term for a biological being (from the non-biological @Ats).
- Film Noir: The first issue begins with a dead body in the rain. The story is a definite mixture between science fiction and film noir.
- Grand Theft Me: The @At are capable of "hacking" into the brains of organic lifeforms. This is how Averrup is killed and ultimately revealed what happened to cause the murder that started the story.
- I'm a Humanitarian: The keh-Topli as a race are instinctually driven to devour other sapient life forms. This developed into spiritual reverence for it and, even though they suppress it for the sake of interacting with other species, have "you smell delicious" as a compliment of respect.
- Innocent Aliens: Most of the members of the "peace force" in the City Enduring don't even know what to do when a murder happens, since it's been so long. Jo is the only one that knows to seal it off and call whatever forensics they have.
- Insanity Defense: After Jo tears up a sweatshop without police backup, Siz suggests that she can get out of punishment if she claims that she was caught in "Temporary emotional insanity". Jo calls out the idiocy of it, since there is no such condition in humans.
- Military Superhero: Jo is an Army vet who served in the Middle East. She did so as a way to try and help correct some wrongs in the world, having seen various forms of injustice while growing up, but it only made her question if doing that was itself right. See Desperately Looking for a Purpose in Life, above.
- No Biochemical Barriers: Averted. Siz accidentally served Jo a drink containing cyanide, since she didn't get the memo that it's poisonous to humans. Siz also notes that Jo is lucky she can get any nourishment from Nah food.
- Space City of Hats: The Trilogy each have their own unique quirks.
- The Nah are the most "human" of the three, superficially resembling humans of primarily African descent with frill-like wings and reptilian tails, though they apparently have venomous spines in said wings. They serve as sort of a baseline of the three species.
- The @At (Pronounced "At-At") are described in-universe as "living search engines" that exist as data, but can use hard light projectors to manifest physically. They excel at anything having to do with computers and patterns, and covet memes as much as humans do gold, which makes them valuable in a technologically-dependent society like the City Enduring.
- The keh-Topli are carnivorous plants, and crave to eat other sentient beings, likening the lack of anything within their hollow Venus flytrap-like chest-stomachs to a coldness or a desire to be filled. Of the three, they tend to be the most reserved, but can also create incredible music and art.
- And all three share the Hat of having very intense emotions, each for their own reasons, which is why they have the Emotion Exploit. The fact that said Exploit lowers their emotions down to what a human would consider normal, and how scary they can be when under the effects of Switchoff, shows how hard it is for them to control their emotions, and how easy it was for them to destroy their home system in a brief but furious war.
- Plant Aliens: The keh-Topli appear to be these. In their native appearance they resemble a bundle of Venus flytraps on legs.
- Rubber-Forehead Aliens: The Nah resemble technicolor, African humans, while keh-Topli are shown to be non-humanoid in their native appearance, but shifted into a more humanoid form to more amicably interact with them.
- Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: The City Enduring has 20 billion citizens, nearly three times the population of Earth, and it is all governed by three people, who could never hope to represent the interests of that many people. This is completely intentional, as the supposedly elected leaders represent the interests of a tiny minority rather than the whole.
- Straw Vulcan: Played with. Some of the citizens of the City Enduring view emotions as a bad thing due to a previous conflict. However, it is acknowledged that their fears are understandable even if they aren't quite justified.
- Time Dissonance: As digital beings the @Ats perception of time differs from their organic peers. According to Jo's assistant, minutes to them are like years.
- Translator Microbes: Jo has the usual one built into her power ring but is trying to use the City's version because then she gets to actually hear the language and she can try to learn it.
- Vocal Minority: In-Universe. @CanHaz tells Jo that when the Emotion Exploit was first introduced, it was opposed by a majority of the population. However, the minority who supported it were in control of the government at the time, so it was made mandatory and became norm after a while.
- Voluntary Shapeshifting:
- The keh-Topli look like a mass of walking Venus flytraps in their native appearance, but can assume something more humanoid when interacting with other humanoid species
- The Guardian that gave Jo her ring first appeared human in stature, with only a blue tinge giving her nature away. She gradually revealed her true appearance while talking with Jo, mostly shrinking while floating in place as her skin became more vividly blue.
- Worthless Yellow Rocks: In issue #8, Jo compares earth memes to gold (since @Ats can consume them for "sustenance"), wondering why they are so sought-after when any other meme would do. @CanHaz, her assistant, briefly wonders about the comparison since gold is virtually useless.
- Strangely enough, an AI like @CanHaz would most likely be able to understand that gold has value, although not for the same reason humans consider it valuable. It's an excellent conductor of electricity, after all.
