Review by C.J. Bunce
French writer-artist Ugo Bienvenu’s cautionary tale System Preference (not to be confused with the Connie Willis story) is even more on point in 2025 than when it was first published in 2019. Bienvenu doesn’t pull any punches or use any kind of subtlety in previewing the coming oblivious world allowing artificial intelligence to take over every aspect of humanity until it erases all evidence of human history and the ability of rational thought itself. It all begins when a corporation requires freeing up server space by deleting the last copy of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey and all corresponding information about it (presumably that includes Arthur C. Clarke’s original novel).
Next month Titan Comics is bringing an English edition to comic shops and other bookstores (you can pre-order it now here at Amazon). Billed as a “Black Mirror-esque shock satire,” it could serve as a springboard to science fiction classics that pinpointed this downward slide decades ago, as it borrows themes from Kurt Vonnegut’s vision of a dehumanized future in Harrison Bergeron and Connie Willis’s look at revisionists changing history to their liking in Remake.
The protagonist is Joe Mathon. In this stifling future it’s forbidden to sneak data out of the master computer center and just back it up at home on your own server, or in this case, Joe’s biped robot named Mikki. But that’s what Joe does, and apparently has been doing, to his wife Emy’s chagrin. Even his robot, who is also carrying the couple’s baby in a transparent belly, advises Joe it’s illegal and he should stop. Of course it’s the algorithms that have taken over human’s ability to discriminate between what goes and what doesn’t, what is good and what isn’t, what is important, and what is not. The actual setting is any town in France but might as well be Topeka, Kansas–one cityscape looks identical to the highway through that city. The automobiles all resemble Teslas–only in color options.
Emy may as well be Tom in Connie Willis’s 1996 Hugo Award nominated novel Remake. In that book protagonist Tom edited out smoking from movies and replaced actors with other actors, among other things. Here Emy is in the business of retakes, editing movies to be exactly right, as the algorithms indicate. Currently she is re-editing season 19 of a series called Playmobil. Unlike the masses in THX-1138 or Logan’s Run, these characters aren’t oblivious to what’s going on around them, they are just complicit–they don’t take action. As Jonita says of the creation process, “They’re so scared of offending interest groups, they’ve smoothed over every rough edge. Instead of the universal you get the specific, the individual. Every last detail becomes its own category. And worst of all, it works. Because it makes everyone feel like their own minority. Stories don’t unite anymore. There’s only one side to the coin now: Lies.” But, hey, they’re keeping the complete works of Victor Hugo.
But other people surrounding Joe are thinking about what is happening. One acknowledges how humans freely swapped speed and efficiency for everything else, seeking technological solutions instead of being creative. Humanity has made itself obsolete. “Stories made us who we are, and data will erase us.”
As for Bienvenu’s visual depictions of the future, he opts out of Syd Mead’s dark tech noir for more classic views, including the cold tones and environments in the Earth scenes of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, or the descriptions of Philip K. Dick in short stories like Minority Report. As Joe’s very Jeff Koons-inspired artist friend remarks, “No one creates anymore, they just recycle.”
Less total oblivion like in The Terminator or Planet of the Apes, it’s easier to see Bienvenu’s future as a step away from The Matrix. The writer’s storytelling is stomach-churning cold, like the feeling you get reading another dystopian thriller, Snowpiercer (Jacques Lob, Benjamin Legrand and Jean-Marc Rochette). All dystopia isn’t just science fiction, it’s horror. The scariest part is this story takes place only tomorrow.
In the end, the story falls somewhere between The Postman and The Road… and Rock ’em Sock ’em Robots? It’s a good extension and mash-up of nuggets from creative minds of the past who may have just been prescient with the speculative fiction thing. It also isn’t devoid of humor. When Joe’s girl first gets to watch 2001: A Space Odyssey, she finds it boring (her father fell asleep six times before gtting through it all, so Bienvenu doesn’t give Kubrick a free pass here). There’s hope, as even if an Arthur Rimbaud poem doesn’t survive the next data dump, it can exist in memory, which is how it was all done for thousands of years of human history.
Here is a look inside System Preference:
Highly recommended, add System Preference to your comic shop pull list at Elite Comics or your local comic shop, or pre-order it now here at Amazon. System Preference is on sale September 16, 2025.
