Shangri-La

Mathieu Bablet wrote and drew Shangri-La, published by Ankama in 2016. Humanity lives on a space station under the influence of Tianzhu Enterprises, which pursues a project connected to creating life near Titan.

The story moves between private lives, scientific ambition, and the corporation's public vision of progress. Its promised new world throws the engineered limits of the existing one into relief.

The book makes a familiar space-colonization promise feel uneasy: a new home can inherit the institutions that damaged the old one. Its strength lies in treating the station as a complete society rather than mere scenery for an experiment.

Bablet draws the corporate future at a scale that can dwarf its inhabitants. That choice makes questions of who controls the future feel spatial and immediate.

The artificial habitat and the Titan project tie survival to managed environments. The possibility of creating life raises a sharper question about who has authority to define it.

The technology also sharpens a class conflict. When a single enterprise shapes the station's economy and scientific horizon, exploration can become another form of ownership.

Bablet's dense architecture gives the station both grandeur and confinement. Vast exterior views repeatedly meet crowded interiors and the small scale of individual bodies.

The contrast helps the book hold wonder and distrust in the same image. It is a visually extravagant future with little room to escape its systems.