World Without Stars - Notes

Notes

• This album marks an important turning point in the series in two respects – first, the two characters are separated for most of the adventure, allowing Laureline to come out from under Valérian’s shadow for the first time. Second, while in the previous stories the two heroes encountered and fought obvious villains or evil geniuses, here the two races of Zahir are separated by ideology. The key plot point, that Valérian and Laureline must try to find some means of reconciliation between two opposing sides, will be repeated in many of the subsequent adventures.
• The central concepts of this album use a number of well known science fiction clichés — a hollow planet has been explored most notably by Jules Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs, the notion of a catastrophe caused by a planetary collision has been seen in the film When Worlds Collide while the war-of-the-sexes concept crops up in Star Trek, Buck Rogers, Lost In Space and the like.
• This album include visual and conceptual elements inspired by Frank Herbert's Dune, the French editions of which were published in 1970 and 1972, in the same period as this comic book. The Lemm people have "blue-in-blue" eyes like Dune's Fremen, their environment looks like planet Arrakis and they mine an explosive substance called 'flogum' (reminiscent of Dune's spice melange) which they sell to feuding houses reminiscent of Houses Atreides and Harkonnen.
• This album was translated into English by L. Mitchell and published in 1984 by Dargaud USA in the United States of America (ISBN 2-205-06573-4) and in 1985 by Hodder Dargaud Ltd in the United Kingdom (ISBN 0-340-38084-5).