ALAN GRANT & ARTHUR RANSON – JUDGE ANDERSON – TRIAD 2003
- 2000 AD TITAN BOOKS
A collection of dark tales featuring Judge Dredd’s psychic police division heroine, and ally, Judge Anderson.
Beyond The Void deals with a group of Hindu monks attempting to attain Nirvana, but unwittingly opening their minds to the terrifying Judge Death, a nihilistic destroyer who is trying to get back into our dimension. One monk is called Mahatma Coat.
Contact deals with the arrival of an alien race in a mysterious spaceship. Anderson is sent to find out if they are friendly, and after initially thinking they are, she has visions of them destroying us all, which sets fellow judges, including Dredd, on a war footing. In fact, the aliens are friendly, and have picked up on Anderson’s own inner fears that they might not have been. They think we might be the destructive ones. Anderson manages to arrange their peaceful arrival. .
The Prophet is a complicated tale about a man convinced that robots will destroy humanity. To save her, he brainwashes his wife into thinking she is a machine. He then tries to protect himself by hiding in a pretend robot suit, only to get fused into it and go on a killing spree of his own. Anderson saves the day.
The Screaming Skull is a genuinely scary story, in which a man is visited by visions of a screaming skeletal skull, and goes insane. The skull has been sent by his wife, herself a psychic like Anderson (investigating), to frighten him into doing what she wants. Her husband is an undertaker who once killed a man when he found out he was still alive on the brink of being buried. He has been led to believe that the victim of his own crime has returned to haunt him.
Triad The title story is the weakest of an excellent set here – a computational group have set up children as psychic visionaries in a series of vengeance attacks on various men they oppose. The brutal mass murde4rs, (including spontaneous human combustion attacks0 are witnessed by two psychic twins, who Anderson uses to help her crack the case, and then has to separate from their loving mother, to help harness their powers.
An excellent and exciting collection.
Arthur Chappell
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