Drive

[Radar]

So... Drive

I have seen that regrettably it does not have its own thread here, so I felt I should make one to spread the word about a this little quirky gem of a webcomics. So, in the future humans build a cosmic empire ruled with iron hand by a single family which keeps the power as they are the only ones, who know how to build FTL drives. There is a small problem though, the design was stolen by dumb luck and the creators of the original are pretty insistent that humans give it back.

Drive is a space opera with multiple interesting alien species with their own culture and view on the universe, captivating multithreaded plot, solid helping of humor and a science officer (in charge of translating sciency stuff to normal language), who speaks with a very thick accent, because he once ran out of cab fare near Moskow and got stuck there for 6 years. Also quite a few ancient mysteries that might decide the future of the galaxy.

Anyone else reading it here? Thoughts, remarks?

[HorizonWalker]

I've been following it since the beginning, and enjoyed myself the whole way through. One thing I especially like is the Continuum of Makers, and their genuinely interesting spirituality.

For those who don't read it, the Continuum of Makers are a race of techno-spiritual isolationists who reproduce via parthenogenesis- there's pretty much no genetic diversity within the Continuum, and so they differentiate themselves through making. That's their thing, they make things. They are the Makers, and their technologies are called spirits.

And it's just... so refreshing, to see the Makers be these studious, inventive, enlightened scholars, who are also deeply spiritual and reverent. We see a lot of their faith, in big picture and little details... it's fantastic. I love it.

[Radar]

I've been following it since the beginning, and enjoyed myself the whole way through. One thing I especially like is the Continuum of Makers, and their genuinely interesting spirituality.

For those who don't read it, the Continuum of Makers are a race of techno-spiritual isolationists who reproduce via parthenogenesis- there's pretty much no genetic diversity within the Continuum, and so they differentiate themselves through making. That's their thing, they make things. They are the Makers, and their technologies are called spirits.

And it's just... so refreshing, to see the Makers be these studious, inventive, enlightened scholars, who are also deeply spiritual and reverent. We see a lot of their faith, in big picture and little details... it's fantastic. I love it.

Yeah, the whole idea of their society is interesting and well fleshed out. Also I am not sure if the process they are using is parthenogenesis or outright cloning as the former would still allow for genetic diversity even if at a slower pace. Parhenogenesis would most likely also not allow for creating arbitrary number of offsprings on a short notice, unless they have all their eggs extracted and stored at hand but it would still limit the number of expendable soldiers you can create. The way it is shown, they consider themselves as direct continuations of a single person - hence the Continuum.

The other species also could be interesting but we simply did not spend enough time exploring them and learn the diversity under their standing out racial traits.

One of the funny twists was that early on we learn that blatantly pacifist Veetans easily ended a war that was not going well for humans and one can assume that it was a classical case of a "do not anger the polite people" trope. Then you learn that

Spoiler

Show

It was a crazy bluff that could only work because the Tesskans they were at war with are pretty dimwitted.

One thing the comics truly lacks (and it painful at times) is an archive you could browse directly. Since the pages are named by date it is not so easy to navigate by hand either.